Poster Session 3
1. Structural Maintenance and Within Language Innovations in Spanish as a Heritage Language: Accusative Clitic Doubling
- Silvina Montrul, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Lorena Alarcón, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Irati Hurtado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Karen Pasetto Ovelar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Accusative clitic doubling (ACD) is the co-existence of an accusative clitic and the object it refers to (La llamé a Alejandra). It is typical of Argentine Spanish but largely unacceptable in the Mexico and Peninsular varieties (Hurtado, 2024). In both Romanian and Argentine Spanish, Differential Object Marking (DOM) and ACD are syntactically related (Di Tullio et al., 2019; Hill & Mardale, 2020) because animate objects that are clitic doubled must have DOM. Montrul (2023) found that heritage speakers of Romanian omitted obligatory DOM significantly less than heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish and suggested that the availability of ACD in Romanian may partly explain the difference.
We tested the hypothesis that heritage speakers of Argentine Spanish in the United States will omit DOM with animate objects significantly less than Mexican heritage speakers, if they retain ACD in their grammars. Data collection is ongoing. To date we have tested 30 adult first generation immigrants from Argentina, 15 Argentine heritage speakers, 10 first generation immigrants from Mexico and 10 Mexican heritage speakers. All participants completed a language questionnaire, the bilingual language profile (Birdsong et al., 2012), a written proficiency test, a written acceptability task, and an oral picture description task with and without priming of accusative clitic doubling with animate and inanimate objects. The acceptability task included grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with animate and inanimate objects, with/out DOM and with/out ACD. In a language background questionnaire, we asked participants if they interacted with speakers from other Spanish varieties in the United States and to indicate which countries.
Results so far show that Argentine heritage speakers accept ACD significantly more than the Mexican heritage speakers in the AJT; in the production task, they produce ACD and omit DOM with animate specific objects significantly less than the Mexican heritage speakers, confirming the proposed syntactic relationship between DOM and ACD, as per our hypothesis. They also produced and accepted more ACD than first generation Argentine immigrants, suggesting that they may use ACD as an identity marker of their heritage variety. Despite reported low contact between Mexican and Argentine HSs, compared to first-generation immigrants from Mexico, some Mexican heritage speakers also accepted and produced ACD, suggesting that their grammars generate structures available and acceptable in other Spanish varieties. This study illustrates the flexibility of heritage grammars compared to first generation grammars on the one hand, and elucidates how innovations in heritage grammars are hardly random and not always ungrammatical; in fact, they fall within the range of what is linguistically possible in Spanish and other languages.
Selected References
Di Tullio, Á., Saab, A. y Zdrojewski, P. (2019). Clitic Doubling in a Doubling World. The Case of Argentinean Spanish Reconsidered. In Á. Gallego (Ed.), Syntactic Variation in Spanish (pp. 215-244). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hurtado-Ruiz, I. (2024). Examining the flexibility of bilingual grammars through syntactic priming (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
Montrul, S. (2023). Native Speakers, Interrupted. Cambridge University Press.
2. Distinguishing Between Typical and Atypical Bilingual Development in the Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax
- Patrick Thane, University Houston / The University of Texas at Austin
- Anny Castilla-Earls, University Houston
Approximately 1.5% of the school-aged population is bilingual and experiences a language disorder, amounting to around 824,000 children (Bonuck et al., 2022; ChildStats Form on Child and Family Statistics, 2022). Morphosyntax is the most reliable area of grammar for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals (Dollaghan & Horner, 2011), but the effects of divided input (herein, bilingualism effects) can lead to similar morphosyntactic outcomes. Distinguishing between the effects of DLD and bilingualism in the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax can therefore be difficult for bilingual clinicians. The present study reports data from 116 Spanish-speaking children ages 4;0 to 6;11. 33 bilinguals with typical development (BL-TD), 33 bilinguals with DLD (BL-DLD), 25 monolinguals with typical development (ML-TD), and 25 monolinguals with DLD (ML-DLD) completed an elicited production measure, an oral story retell, and the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (Bedore & Peña, 2014) in Spanish. Bilingual children also completed the latter two tasks in English, and the cutoff score from the third task was used to classify children with DLD. The elicited production task evaluated children’s command of Spanish articles, direct object clitics, person/number verbal agreement, and subjunctive mood.
Results, summarized in Figure 1 and Table 1 and supported through binomial logistic regression, indicate that typically developing children outperformed those with DLD on all measures. While the ML-TD group produced more target-like adjectives, articles, and clitics than BL-TD participants, these groups were not different with verbal agreement and subjunctive. Finally, the BL-TD group outperformed the ML-DLD group in the production of clitics, verbal agreement, and subjunctive. These findings suggest that clitics, verbal agreement, and subjunctive may be best for disentangling what is typical of bilingualism from what may be the result of language disorder. Moreover, an analysis of response patterns indicates that children with DLD produce fewer instances of the subjunctive with querer than those with TD, such that this structure may be a particularly good indicator of language difficulties in bilinguals. Furthermore, young monolinguals and bilinguals in contexts of typical development do not differ from monolinguals in their knowledge of verbal agreement and subjunctive.
We stress the importance of these findings both for clinicians interested in linguistic justice and theorists interested in language acquisition. Our work aims to lay the groundwork for additional diagnostic tools that consider these grammatical areas as reliable tools for identifying language disorder in young children. Moreover, our findings are a reminder that bilingual Spanish speakers can and do pattern with monolinguals in some circumstances, specifically the acquisition of verbal agreement. Moreover, the group-level differences revealed here may prove fruitful for successfully distinguishing between typical and atypical bilingual development and in reducing DLD misdiagnosis in U.S. Spanish speakers.
3. Restoring the use of minority names in language classrooms: The design and efficacy of a teaching plan
- Mei-Hui Tsai, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Calling students by their names is the starting point of teacher-student interaction. However, in contemporary Taiwanese language classrooms, which are dedicated to revitalizing the language, students’ names are rarely uttered in Taiwanese. Similar to most Chinese language communities, written Taiwanese relies mainly on non-phonetic Chinese characters, making the pronunciation of names in Taiwanese dependent on supplementary phonetic systems. Additionally, several factors further complicate the pronunciation of names in Taiwanese, including the language’s complex phonological rules, the preference for rare Chinese characters in Taiwanese names, and the phenomenon of “frozen address terms” (Tsai, in press). Given that restoring the use names in heritage languages is a crucial marker of linguistic identity and a key language revitalization strategy, the teaching and usage of names in Taiwanese language class is an urgent priority.
This study introduces a pedagogical design to address this issue. The design includes ""name tent"" and ""discourse space for name-calling"". A pre- and post-teaching questionnaire was used to assess the effectiveness of this approach. The "" name tent"" includes the student’s name in Chinese characters, phonetic transcription, a self-introduction sentence incorporating commonly used homophones, and a record of extra credits. The discourse space for name-calling "" consists of structured classroom activities, including self-introduction exercises, pair discussions, small-group discussions, the participation of Taiwanese-speaking community members, and biweekly group reassignments.
Based on pre- and post-teaching questionnaire results from three general education classes over two semesters, involving a total of 190 university students, the findings indicate that this pedagogical design significantly enhances students’ familiarity with and recognition of their Taiwanese names. On a six-point scale, students showed significant improvements in three areas: (1) understanding the Taiwanese pronunciation of their names (4.16 vs. 5.26; p < .01); (2) confidence in introducing themselves using Taiwanese (3.53 vs. 4.58; p < .05); and (3) acceptance with using Taiwanese names in the classroom (57.83% vs. 74.28%; p < .01).
Compared to previous studies, this research offers a concrete, feasible, and effective pedagogical design that addresses the restoration of name usage in heritage language classrooms.