Project 2:
Acquisition & development of mood and modality
A. On complexity and divergence in HL grammars [see article here and accessible summary here]
For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers’ (HSs’) mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it difficult to draw conclusions about HSs’ knowledge of mood distinctions. This study intends to fill this gap by examining Spanish HSs’ (n = 76) and Spanish-dominant controls’ (n = 25) interpretation and use of an early acquired mood alternation, where the presence of indicative or subjunctive conveys the report of an assertion or a command. Results from two experimental tasks reveal that, even though HSs’ performance tends to differ from that of controls’—especially at lower levels of proficiency—the nature and extent of their divergences suggest the need to embrace a more nuanced analysis of HSs’ linguistic outcomes when examining modal contrasts. B. Re-examining the role of mood selection type in Spanish HS subjunctive production [see article here] This article explores this area of research by examining the effects of mood selection type on HSs’ subjunctive use. In contrast with previous studies, this investigation controls for propositional modality, focusing its analyses on instances of obligatory and variable subjunctive selection within deontic predicates. Results from a production task revealed that, despite the presence of between-group differences driven by participants’ levels of proficiency, type of selection did not significantly modulate their rates of subjunctive use. These findings challenge previous claims about the extent to which this factor affects Spanish HSs’ performance, and highlight the importance of considering propositional modality when examining the acquisition of mood. C. The role of form regularity & lexical frequency in the acquisition of mood selection [see article here] The present investigation examines intra-speaker variability in heritage speakers of Spanish by focusing on the potential effects of two variables in their acquisition of mood: lexical frequency and morphological regularity. To do so, this study tested 17 intermediate Spanish heritage speakers’ (HS) interpretation and use of early-acquired mood alternations conveying either assertive or jussive meanings. Results from a truth-value judgment and a picture-based sentence completion task revealed that HS’ overall performance was significantly affected by the lexical frequency of the matrix verb introducing the modal alternation, as well as by the regularity of the embedded verbal form. In particular, frequent matrix verbs and irregular forms yielded higher rates of accuracy across most of the experimental tasks, suggesting that the degree of variability in HS’ outcomes is determined, to a certain extent, by these two factors. These results favor an account of heritage language acquisition and loss focused on the effects of lexical activation on bilinguals’ grammatical representations (Putnam and Sánchez, 2013). |
D. Effects of morphological variability (subj mood) on null subject interpretation [see article here]
This investigation focuses on how HSs express and interpret subject co-referentiality and disjoint reference in desiderative constructions. Results from two experimental tasks (a Truth-Value judgment and a Sentence Completion task) revealed that participants’ Spanish proficiency was a significant predictor of their performance. In particular, more advanced HSs exhibited a higher likelihood of linking the presence of subjunctive to subject disjoint reference (a pattern observed among most Spanish controls) and a higher probability of using this form to express subject disjoint-reference in production. Furthermore, optionality in this domain was significantly linked to the degree to which HSs restructured the referential properties associated with subjunctive complements. Specifically, participants who exhibited lower rates of structural and morphological variability in connection to the expression of disjoint-reference also appeared to be more likely to assign this reading to the null subjects of subjunctive complements and reject the possibility of subject co-referentiality. These findings provide new evidence of how syntactic dependencies such as subject obviation and control are developed among heritage speakers of Spanish and explore the potential role of structural and morphological optionality in their (re)-configuration. |