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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 15:6 (2025) ► pp.745–775

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School, age, and exposure effects in the child heritage language acquisition of the Spanish volitional subjunctive

ORCiD logo with link | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Published online: 31 May 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.23057.tha
Abstract
The present study investigated the production and receptive knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive mood in volitional clauses by 57 English-dominant heritage speakers in fifth, seventh, and eighth grades (ages 10–14), some of whom were enrolled in a dual-language immersion program. Children’s self-reported frequency of use of Spanish affected command of this structure, and participants showed more consistent selection of the subjunctive than production of this form. There were no differences in production or selection between children in the dual-language immersion and monolingual English schools, but older children produced and selected the subjunctive more than younger participants. The lexical frequency of individual subordinate verbs did not affect subjunctive use. The role for frequency of use and asymmetrical performance between tasks support Putnam, M. T., & Sánchez, L. (2013). What’s so incomplete about incomplete acquisition?: A prolegomenon to modeling heritage language grammars. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3(4), 478–508. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar activation approach to heritage language acquisition. However, the absence of an effect for bilingual schooling or lexical frequency and the increased use of subjunctive mood with age do not strictly align with theories of a reassembly of features in heritage language acquisition, and argue for a protracted development of subjunctive mood in heritage Spanish.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Exposure, heritage language development, and dual language immersion
  • 3.Spanish subjunctive mood: Theory and acquisition
    • 3.1Monolingual acquisition
    • 3.2Heritage language acquisition of subjunctive
  • 4.The study
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Method and tasks
      • 4.2.1Language background tasks
      • 4.2.2Linguistic tasks
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Analysis
    • 5.2Descriptive analysis
    • 5.3Individual analyses
    • 5.4Inferential statistics
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Data availability statement
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Solano-Escobar, Laura
2025. The production of the subjunctive in child heritage Spanish: an examination of early acquired contexts. Lingua 326 ► pp. 104026 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

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