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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 10:6 (2020) ► pp.775–804

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Present tense verb morphology of Spanish HL and L2 children in dual immersion

Feature Reassembly revisited

ORCiD logo with link | University of Washington
 | University of Washington
Published online: 3 June 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18026.fer
Abstract
We provide a snapshot of childhood morphology development in our investigation of two profiles of bilinguals (age 9–10) in an English-Spanish dual immersion academic setting: Spanish heritage language (SHL, n = 21) and second language (SL2, n = 41) children. Three tasks were given to the 62 bilinguals and 15 age-matched controls (Spanish first language, SL1): oral comprehension of 20 singular-plural present verbs, written sentence production of 10 similar verbs, and a meaning-focused writing task. SHL children were comparable to controls in production of number agreement, and showed no asymmetry between comprehension and production. SL2 learners showed lower accuracy than both SHL and SL1 children. A similar pattern was observed when person agreement and tense, aspect, mood and vowel errors were considered. The most common error among SHL and SL2 children was overregularization of stem vowels, a typical developmental error. The Feature Reassembly model of grammar can accommodate the range of possibilities represented by the data we present.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Spanish and English verbal morphosyntax
    • 2.2Revised feature reassembly
    • 2.3Development of verbal agreement: L1, HL and child L2 bilinguals
    • 2.4Research questions
  • 3.Current study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Tasks and procedure
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Subject-verb number agreement
    • 4.2Subject-verb person agreement
    • 4.3TAM and thematic vowel
    • 4.4Stem-changing verbs
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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