Within the field of heritage language research the vast majority of studies have concluded that heritage speakers’ knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive is subject to incomplete acquisition. However this conclusion is oftentimes the result of a misinterpretation of the variability inherent to heritage grammars.The present study challenges these deficit-oriented perspectives by employing a usage-based approach to integrate sociolinguistic data into the design of a psycholinguistic experiment that examines processing of the Spanish subjunctive during online comprehension in heritage speakers’ belonging to a long-standing bilingual community in Albuquerque (NM). In addition other lexical factors (i.e. morphological regularity and lexical frequency) that might modulate speakers’ sensitivity to the factors that condition mood selection were also explored to better characterize the linguistic profile of participants. Twenty-five heritage speakers of Spanish participated in the experiment. Participants heard a preceding context (Table 1) followed by a target sentence in two conditions: in Condition 1 (C1) the subordinate verb was presented in the subjunctive form (licensed condition); in Condition 2 (C2) the subordinate verb was presented in the indicative form (unlicensed condition). In both conditions the main verb subcategorized for a verb with subjunctive morphology. We predicted that: 1. If participants were immediately sensitive to the lexical constraints encoded in the main verb C1 should be easier to process than C2. Our results.2. Linguistic and sociolinguistic factors would play a crucial role in modulating participants’ sensitivity to the constraints on mood selection.Our results support these predictions such that all participants within the sample were sensitive to the lexical conditioning of mood selection showing that C2 was harder to process. Moreover it was found that in line with previous literature regular subordinate verbs were harder to process. Finally participants' proficiency and weekly use of the heritage language also modulated their sensitivity such that those with higher proficiency and more use of the language were more sensitive. The findings reported highlight that factors such as the community examined the ecological validity of the materials used and the diversity of explanatory variables included in analyses are crucial and can contribute significantly to a more unified theory of heritage language acquisition and processing with much greater explanatory adequacy.

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