Talk’s title: The Impact of Literacy on the Production of Verbal Passives in School-age Spanish Heritage Speakers and L1 Spanish Adults
Abstract:
The goal of this study is to investigate how first language (L1) literacy impacts syntactic development in young Spanish heritage speakers living in the United States. It is common for these children to develop Spanish at home as their L1 before starting school in English, their L2. Previous research demonstrates that exposure to textual input during the school-age period contributes to children’s language development, such as increasing lexical knowledge and the ability to produce complex syntactic structures. However, it is unclear how heritage speakers’ L1 (Spanish) growth is affected by learning to read and write in their L2 (English). To investigate this, we conducted an oral elicited imitation task in which 9 – 12-year-old Spanish heritage speakers produced verbal passives, a complex syntactic structure that occurs more commonly in written language. One group of children was enrolled in school where literacy was taught in English only, and another group of children was enrolled in a bilingual school where literacy (and other content) was taught in Spanish and English. We also carried out this study with L1 Spanish immigrants who moved to the United States as adults and had varying levels of formal education. The passive sentences that participants heard and repeated were manipulated to be plausible or implausible (The man was bitten by the dog vs. The dog was bitten by the man) to test participants’ reliance on general world knowledge while parsing and reproducing passive sentences. They were also manipulated for morphological gender cues about who did what in the sentence to test participants’ reliance on morphosyntactic structure. Participants also completed a series of literacy and working memory tasks. The results indicate that all heritage speakers performed more accurately on active sentences than passive sentences. However, the decrease in accuracy was significantly greater for the heritage speakers who attended English-only schools and had limited Spanish literacy. The L1 Spanish adults with different levels of formal education did not show this contrast. Their accuracy in producing verbal passives was also less sensitive to implausibility than the children. Overall, these results provide evidence that although all heritage speakers acquired Spanish at home from birth, those who develop Spanish literacy appear to have a stronger command of complex syntax in their L1. This is notable given that strong L1 Spanish development is often seen to result in better outcomes for both Spanish and English in bilingual children.
