Please join us in Rosenwald 301 on Friday, April 12 at 3:30 PM for the next LVC meeting of the Spring Quarter! Adam Cleveland will be presenting on the effect of lexical access and frequency on the acquisition of 2nd person pronominal forms among heritage and second language speakers of Spanish.

Tú and Usted: Lexical Access and Frequency Effects among Heritage and Second Language Speakers of Spanish

Prior research on heritage bilingual speakers of Spanish has shown their oral production and receptive interpretation of some aspects of their grammar are susceptible to lexical frequency effects, such as subjunctive mood (Giancaspro, 2020), differential object marking (Hur et al., 2020), and subject placement (López Otero, 2022). Prior work has also shown that lexical frequency plays a role in second language acquisition as well (DeKeyser, 2005; Ellis and Ferreira-Junior, 2009). In bilingual studies, lexical access and dominance are important variables to consider due to the presence of two (or more) coactivated grammars, resulting in competition (Abutalebi & Green, 2007; Bialystok et al., 2008a, 2008b; Kroll & Gollan, 2014), as well as accounting for nuanced linguistic and extralinguistic modulating variables (Birdsong, 2014; Gertken et al., 2014), respectively. The current study assumes a differential access approach (Putnam & Sánchez, 2013; Pérez-Cortes et al., 2019) to heritage language acquisition in conjunction with bilingual alignments (Sánchez, 2019), which posit that limited opportunities for activation of the heritage language may be the cause of differences in productive and receptive knowledge in heritage speakers; therefore, this asymmetrical access to both grammars may result in unstable bilingual alignments, and speakers may rely on underspecified, “default” morphosyntactic representations (Béjar, 2003). The current exploratory study seeks to examine the effects (or lack thereof) of lexical frequency, lexical access, and dominance in both heritage and L2 bilinguals on their receptive and productive knowledge of 2nd person pronominal forms in Spanish (i.e. tú and usted). The experiment consists of two experimental tasks — an elicited production task (EPT) and an acceptability judgment task (AJT). Pilot results analyzed with logistic and multiple linear regression models show general differences in heritage and L2 speakers compared to their respective baselines in both tasks. Results from the EPT suggest that lexical frequency may have an effect for heritage speakers, but not so for L2 speakers. Results from the AJT suggest that lexical frequency may also have an effect on HS, but not so for L2 speakers. Generally, more lexical access and dominance in English negatively affected acceptability rating. These preliminary findings suggest variability in receptive and productive knowledge of 2nd person pronominal forms in heritage speakers may be somewhat affected by lexical frequency, whereas L2 speakers may be relying more on pragmatic knowledge. The dissertation will further explore these effects with more data and mixed effects statistical modeling.