Cover not available

Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 14:5 (2024) ► pp.640–667

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Frequency effects and aspect morphology with state verbs in heritage Spanish

ORCiD logo with link | Rutgers University – New Brunswick
Published online: 8 March 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.22025.tha
Abstract
A total of 54 HS and 17 Spanish-dominant participants completed an elicited production task (EPT) and a forced choice task (FCT) to explore how proficiency, frequency of use, age of acquisition of English, morphological regularity, and lexical frequency affected their production and selection of preterit morphology with states. Results showed that HS’ production of preterit with states was negatively correlated with lexical frequency, such that these bilinguals were more likely to use the preterit with less-frequent verbs. Higher-proficiency speakers were less susceptible to the effects of lexical frequency in production. In contrast, proficiency modulated HS’ responses in the FCT. HS were more likely to select the preterit in the FCT than to produce it in the EPT. Together, these results support theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasize the role of activation of linguistic features and asymmetries between production and comprehension.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Introduction to aspect
    • 2.1Grammatical aspect in Spanish
    • 2.2Aspect in Spanish as a HL
  • 3.Evaluating intraspeaker variability
    • 3.1Lexical frequency
    • 3.2Morphological regularity
    • 3.3Task effects and asymmetrical performance
    • 3.4The role of comparison groups
  • 4.The present study
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Biographical measures
    • 4.3Experimental tasks
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Inferential statistics
      • 5.1.1Group-task-proficiency model
      • 5.1.2Results for HS
    • 5.2Summary of findings
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (65)
References
Alarcón, I. V. (2011). Spanish gender agreement under complete and incomplete acquisition: Early and late bilinguals’ linguistic behavior within the noun phrase. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(3), 332–350. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Andersen, R. W., & Shirai, Y. (1994). Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16(2), 133–156. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1996). The primacy of aspect in first and second language acquisition. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 527–570). Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., & Schreuder, R. (2000). Towards a psycholinguistic computational model for morphological parsing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 3581, 1281–1293. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Comajoan-Colomé, L. (2020). The Aspect Hypothesis and the acquisition of L2 past morphology in the last 20 years: A state-of-the-scholarship review. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 42(5), 1137–1167. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (1995). Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10(5), 425–455. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2010). Language, usage and cognition (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bylund, E., & Jarvis, S. (2011). L2 effects on L1 event conceptualization. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(1), 47–59. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Comajoan, L. (2005). The early L2 acquisition of past morphology: Perfective morphology as an aspectual marker or default tense marker? In D. Eddington (Ed.), Selected proceedings of the 6th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages (pp. 31–43). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cuza, A., & Frank, J. (2011). Transfer effects at the syntax-semantics interface: The case of double-que questions in heritage Spanish. Heritage Language Journal, 8(1), 66–89. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cuza, A., & Miller, L. (2015). The protracted acquisition of past tense aspectual values in child heritage Spanish. In R. Klassen, J. M. Liceras, & E. Valenzuela (Eds.), Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics (Vol. 41, pp. 211–230). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cuza, A., & Pérez-Tattam, R. (2016). Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(1), 50–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cuza, A., Pérez-Tattam, R., Barajas, E., Miller, L., & Sadowski, C. (2013). The development of tense and aspect morphology in child and adult heritage speakers. In J. W. Schwieter (Ed.), Language learning and language teaching (Vol. 381, pp. 193–220). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davies, M. (2016). Corpus del español. [URL]
de Swart, H. (1998). Aspect shift and coercion. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 161, 347–385. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Depraetere, I. (1995). On the necessity of distinguishing between (un)boundedness and (a)telicity. Linguistics and Philosophy, 18(1), 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Domínguez, L., Arche, M. J., & Myles, F. (2011). Testing the predictions of the Feature-Assembly Hypothesis: Evidence from the L2 acquisition of Spanish aspect morphology. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 183–196). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Spanish Imperfect revisited: Exploring L1 influence in the reassembly of imperfective features onto new L2 forms. Second Language Research, 33(4), 431–457. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Domínguez, L., Hicks, G., & Slabakova, R. (2019). Terminology choice in generative acquisition research: The case of “incomplete acquisition” in heritage language grammars. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(2), 241–255. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fábregas, A., & Marín, R. (2017). On non-dynamic eventive verbs in Spanish. Linguistics, 55(3). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernández-Dobao, A., & Herschensohn, J. (2021). Acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology by child bilinguals: Overregularization by heritage speakers and second language learners. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24(1), 56–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giancaspro, D. (2020). Not in the mood: Frequency effects in heritage speakers’ subjunctive knowledge. In B. Brehmer & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Studies in bilingualism (Vol. 591, pp. 72–97). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giancaspro, D., Perez-Cortes, S., & Higdon, J. (2022). (Ir)regular mood swings: Lexical variability in heritage speakers’ oral production of subjunctive mood. Language Learning, 72(2), 456–496. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giancaspro, D., & Sánchez, L. (2021). Me, mi, my: Innovation and variability in heritage speakers’ knowledge of inalienable possession. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 6(1). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldin, M. (2021). Language activation in dual language schools: The development of subject-verb agreement in the English and Spanish of heritage speaker children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halle, M., & Marantz, A. (1993). Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In K. L. Hale & S. J. Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 20 (pp. 111–176). MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hur, E. (2020). Verbal lexical frequency and DOM in heritage speakers of Spanish. In A. Mardale & S. Montrul (Eds.), Trends in language acquisition research (Vol. 261, pp. 207–235). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hur, E., Lopez Otero, J. C., & Sánchez, L. (2020). Gender agreement and assignment in Spanish heritage speakers: Does frequency matter? Languages, 5(48). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lardiere, D. (2008). Feature-assembly in second language acquisition. In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition (1st ed., pp. 106–140). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lohndal, T., & Putnam, M. T. (2021). The tale of two lexicons: Decomposing complexity across a distributed lexicon. Heritage Language Journal, 18(2), 1–29. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lopez Otero, J. C. (2020). The acquisition of the syntactic and morphological properties of Spanish imperatives in heritage and second language learners [Doctoral dissertation]. Rutgers University – New Brunswick.
López-Beltrán Forcada, P. (2021). Heritage speakers’ online processing of the Spanish subjunctive: A comprehensive usage-based study [Doctoral dissertation]. The Pennsylvania State University.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maienborn, C. (2019). Events and states. In R. Truswell (Ed.), Oxford handbook of event structure (pp. 24–65). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montrul, S. (2002). Incomplete acquisition and attrition of Spanish tense/aspect distinctions in adult bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(1), 39–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2009). Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 239–269. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2013). Incomplete L1 acquisition. In J. Herschensohn & M. Young-Scholten (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 353–371). Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montrul, S., & Bowles, M. (2009). Back to basics: Incomplete knowledge of Differential Object Marking in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(3), 363–383. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montrul, S., Foote, R., & Perpiñán, S. (2008). Gender agreement in adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers: The effects of age and context of acquisition. Language Learning, 58(3), 503–553. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montrul, S., & Perpiñán, S. (2011). Assessing differences and similarities between instructed heritage language learners and L2 learners in their knowledge of Spanish tense-aspect and mood (TAM) morphology. Heritage Language Journal, 8(1), 90–133. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montrul, S., & Sánchez-Walker, N. (2013). Differential object marking in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. Language Acquisition, 20(2), 109–132. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ortega, L. (2020). The study of heritage language development from a bilingualism and social justice perspective. Language Learning, 70(S1), 15–53. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pascual y Cabo, D. (2013). Knowledge of gustar-like verbs in Spanish heritage speakers. In J. Cabrelli Amaro, T. Judy, & D. Pascual y Cabo (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (pp. 162–169). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pascual y Cabo, D., & Rothman, J. (2012). The (il)logical problem of heritage speaker bilingualism and incomplete acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 33(4), 450–455. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perez-Cortes, S. (2016). Acquiring obligatory and variable mood selection: Spanish heritage speakers’ and L2 learners’ performance in desideratives and reported speech contexts. [Doctoral dissertation]. Rutgers University – New Brunswick.
(2022). Lexical frequency and morphological regularity as sources of heritage speaker variability in the acquisition of mood. Second Language Research, 38(1), 149–171. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perez-Cortes, S., Putnam, M., & Sánchez, L. (2019). Differential access: Asymmetries in accessing features and building representations in heritage language grammars. Languages, 4(81), 1–27. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pires, A., & Rothman, J. (2009). Disentangling sources of incomplete acquisition: An explanation for competence divergence across heritage grammars. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 211–238. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Polinsky, M. (2011). Reanalysis in adult heritage language: New evidence in support of attrition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(2), 305–328. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368–395. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Putnam, M. T., Sánchez, L., & Perez-Cortes, S. (2019). Language attrition and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. In M. S. Schmid & B. Kopke (Eds.), Oxford handbook of language attrition (pp. 18–24). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Putnam, M. T., Schwarz, L., & Hoffman, A. D. (2021). Morphology of heritage languages. In M. Polinsky & S. Montrul (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of heritage languages and linguistics (pp. 613–643). Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL]
Salaberry, M. R. (2002). Tense and aspect in the selection of Spanish past tense verbal morphology. In M. R. Salaberry & Y. Shirai (Eds.), Language acquisition and language disorders (Vol. 271, pp. 397–415). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2003). Tense aspect in verbal morphology. Hispania, 86(3), 559–573. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sánchez, L. (2004). Functional convergence in the tense, evidentiality and aspectual systems of Quechua Spanish bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(2), 147–162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C. (1994). Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slabakova, R., & Montrul, S. A. (2002). On aspectual shifts in L2 Spanish. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H. J. Do (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 631–642). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: The declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4(2), 105–122. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vendler, Z. (1967). Aspect. Cornell University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wickham, H., Averick, M., Bryan, J., Chang, W., McGowan, L., François, R., Grolemund, G., Hayes, A., Henry, L., Hester, J., Kuhn, M., Pedersen, T., Miller, E., Bache, S., Müller, K., Ooms, J., Robinson, D., Seidel, D., Spinu, V., … Yutani, H. (2019). Welcome to the Tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Cuza, Alejandro
2025. Phrasal verb production in child heritage speakers of English residing in Mexico: Chronological age, experience, and protracted development. International Journal of Bilingualism 29:5 ► pp. 1369 ff. DOI logo
Thane, Patrick D.
2025. Acquiring differential object marking in heritage Spanish: Late childhood to adulthood. International Journal of Bilingualism 29:3 ► pp. 583 ff. DOI logo
Thane, Patrick D.
2025. School, age, and exposure effects in the child heritage language acquisition of the Spanish volitional subjunctive. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 15:6 ► pp. 745 ff. DOI logo
Thane, Patrick D., Jennifer Austin, Stephanie A. Rodríguez & Michele Goldin
2025. The acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive by child heritage and L2 learners: evidence from a dual language program. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 18:1 ► pp. 193 ff. DOI logo
Austin, Jennifer, Patrick D. Thane, Stephanie A. Rodríguez & Michele Goldin
2024. The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: evidence from a dual language program. Frontiers in Language Sciences 3 DOI logo
Giancaspro, David & Josh Higdon
2024. First things third? The extension of canonically third-person singular inflections to first-person singular subjects in adult heritage Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 17:2 ► pp. 251 ff. DOI logo
Mañas Navarrete, Iban, Pedro Guijarro Fuentes & Iria Bello Viruega
2023. The Acquisition of Copula Alternation Ser/Estar and Adjective in L1 Russian, Spanish Heritage Speakers. Languages 8:4 ► pp. 269 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue