• Alejandro Cuza (Purdue University)

This talk presents ongoing work on the acquisition of English as a heritage language in central Mexico. I discuss preliminary results from 24 children (range: 7;5-14;5; M=9;9) of American, Canadian and British-born parents living in Querétaro (Mexico). Data were collected on various morphosyntactic structures including adverb placement, phrasal verbs, subject pronoun use and wh-question formation. In this talk, I’ll focus on 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. Results showed low proportion of target phrasal verb use (~60%); this stemmed primarily from preposition errors (~16% missing prep., *She blew (up) the balloon, ~5% wrong prep.,*She blew up the candles) and “other” structures (~17%). The variability was higher with idiomatic phrases. Regarding wh-question formation, the results showed high proportion of target response 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 (*I don’t know who Diego lended his toys to). The results are discussed in relation to the role of literacy development, language dominance and experience in the extent of morphosyntactic shifts (Shin, Cuza & Sánchez, 2022; Sánchez, 2019).