Silva-Corvalán (1994) observed that incipient changes in the ‘homeland’ speech community were extended by heritage speakers of Spanish in Los Angeles. Recent research has shown that many Peninsular and some Latin American varieties of Spanish have extended the Present Perfect into subsets of perfective contexts for which the Preterite is the canonical verb form especially in pre-hodiernal contexts (e.g. Howe & Schwenter 2003; see also González 2019). However most research on tense and aspect in Spanish heritage speakers has been with Mexican-origin heritage speakers (e.g. Montrul 2009; Montrul & Perpiñan 2011; Cuza et al. 2013; Cuza & Miller 2015) a variety which is not undergoing this change. Putnam and Sánchez (2013) argue that representational changes to the grammar take place when heritage speakers have low levels of access to the heritage grammar. As such we hypothesize that heritage speakers with lower levels of access to Spanish and whose baseline grammar exhibits partial extension of the Present Perfect will further extend the Present Perfect into more temporally distant perfective contexts but that heritage speakers with higher levels of access or with a non-extending baseline will not. Nineteen child heritage speakers of Spanish in the UK and fifteen of their Spanish-speaking parents completed the Cat Story narrative-retelling task that has previously been used in L2 acquisition research of aspect (Domínguez Arche & Myles 2011 2017; Domínguez et al. 2013. Measures of access to Spanish were calculated using the BiLEC questionnaire (Unsworth 2013). Of the children, eleven have parents who speak a variety where the Present Perfect has partially extended into perfective contexts -  ten from Spain and one from northwest Argentina. The remaining eight children have parents in which the canonical Present Perfect - Preterite opposition is maintained, of which three come from Argentina one from Colombia and four from Mexico. The extending group children produced 134 tokens of which 78 Preterite and 35 Present Perfect; their parents produced 177 tokens of which 170 Preterite and 0 Present Perfect. The non-extending group children produced 72 tokens of which 58 Preterite and 0 Present Perfect; their parents produced 85 tokens of which 79 Preterite and 0 Present Perfect. Due to the small group sizes we assessed group differences using non-parametric Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. The children whose baseline grammar allowed extended use of Present Perfect were significantly different from the other children (W = 72 p = 0.009 Hedge’s g = 0.997) and from their parents (W = 90 p = 0.004 Hedge’s g = 1.06) in using the Present Perfect in Preterite contexts showing that individuals within this group further extend the change observed in the baseline grammar. Further examination of the use of the Present Perfect by the heritage speakers of extending varieties using Spearman’s rank correlations suggests that language access predicts their use of the Present Perfect (relative output: rho = -0.643 p = 0.033; Spanish speech rate: rho = -0.723 p = 0.012) supporting our hypothesis that regional variation and language access modulate rates of intergenerational change together.

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