The Production of Idiomatic Phrases and Interrogative Formation in Child Heritage English
Alejandro Cuza, Ph.D. - Purdue University
This talk presents ongoing work on the acquisition of English as a heritage language in central Mexico. I discuss recent data from twenty-four Spanish/English bilingual children (range: 7;5-14;5; M=9;9) of American, Canadian and British-born parents living in Querétaro, Mexico. Fourteen English monolingual children from Indiana (6;11-14;9, M=10;4) participated as baseline group. Data were collected on various morphosyntactic structures, including phrasal verbs and wh-question formation. Phrasal verbs are acquired late in English monolingual development (Cain, Towse & Knight, 2008) and are intrinsically difficult for L2 learners and heritage speakers (Polinsky, 2018). Errors in wh-question formation have been found in child and adult L2 learners of English (Spada & Lightbown, 1999; Pozan & Quirk, 2013) but no previous research to my knowledge has examined heritage speakers of English in contact with Spanish.
Results from an elicited production task showed low proportion of target phrasal verb use, crucially with idiomatic phrases (~50%), compared to monolingual children of similar age (85%). This stemmed primarily from particle omission (*She blew Ø the balloon), wrong particle use (*She blew up the candles) and the production of “other” structures (#She left the bus vs. She got off the bus). Target production was modulated by developmental age (increased performance among older children). There were no effects for linguistic ability (dominance or proficiency). The development of phrasal verbs in heritage English appears to undergo protracted development in contact with Spanish but difficulties do not appear to be insurmountable given specific characteristics of the bilingual community. Regarding wh-question formation, the results showed high proportion of target responses in relation to word order for both matrix and embedded questions (~87). However, we found some morphological errors including infelicitous use of the present tense (#I don’t know who Dora gives her water bottle to), double past tense marking (*Who did Dora gave her guitar to) and overregularization patterns (*I don’t know who Diego lended his toys to). The results are discussed in relation to the effects of age, input, and literacy development in heritage language acquisition (Montrul, 2022, 2008; Sánchez, 2019; Shin, Cuza & Sánchez, 2022; Thane, 2023).
