Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re assembly approach*
The present study examines the development of grammatical gender assignment, agreement, and noun adjective word order in child heritage Spanish among thirty two Spanish English bilingual children born and raised in the United States. A picture naming task revealed significant overextension of the masculine form and high levels of ungrammatical word order strings. There were no significant differences by age regarding gender concord or noun adjective word order. We argue that the differences found can be accounted for in terms of a re assembly of gender features leading to both morphological and syntactic variability. This approach allows for subsequent morphosyntactic shifts during early childhood depending on patterns of language use, and conceptualizes heritage language variation along the lines of current linguistic theorizing regarding the role of innate linguistic principles and language experience in language development.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition