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Language Learning ISSN 0023-8333 Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition Silvina Montrul University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Rebecca Foote Michigan State University Silvia Perpi ˜ an University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and her- itage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisi- tion is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on gender agreement than L2 learners, because their Spanish language acquisition started The research presented in this article was conducted under the generous support of a Beckman Award from the University of Illinois Campus Research Board. We are grateful to all the graduate and undergraduate students who participated in the study, as well as to Susana Vidal, Dan Thornhill, Ben McMurry, Brad Dennison, Alyssa Martoccio, and Luc´ ıa Alzaga, who helped with data collection and transcriptions. Different versions of this study were presented at SLRF 2005 (October 7–9, 2005, Columbia University, New York), the UIUC Department of Linguistics Colloquium (March 26, 2006, Urbana, IL), GASLA 2006 (April 27–30, 2006, University of Calgary, Banff, Alberta), and the Language Processing Brown Bag (February 8, 2007, Beckman Institute, UIUC, Champaign, IL). We want to thank the five Language Learning anonymous reviewers who evaluated this manuscript, and our colleagues Gary Dell, Gary Cziko, Tania Ionin, and Melissa Bowles for their invaluable questions, feedback, and suggestions on previous versions of this work. All remaining errors are our own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Silvina Montrul, Department of Linguistics and Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, MC-176, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801. Internet: [email protected] Language Learning 58:3, September 2008, pp. 503–553 503 C 2008 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan

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Language Learning ISSN 0023-8333

Gender Agreement in Adult Second

Language Learners and Spanish Heritage

Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context

of Acquisition

Silvina MontrulUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rebecca FooteMichigan State University

Silvia PerpinanUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and her-itage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some currenttheoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisi-tion is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurateon gender agreement than L2 learners, because their Spanish language acquisition started

The research presented in this article was conducted under the generous support of a Beckman Award

from the University of Illinois Campus Research Board. We are grateful to all the graduate and

undergraduate students who participated in the study, as well as to Susana Vidal, Dan Thornhill, Ben

McMurry, Brad Dennison, Alyssa Martoccio, and Lucıa Alzaga, who helped with data collection

and transcriptions. Different versions of this study were presented at SLRF 2005 (October 7–9,

2005, Columbia University, New York), the UIUC Department of Linguistics Colloquium (March

26, 2006, Urbana, IL), GASLA 2006 (April 27–30, 2006, University of Calgary, Banff, Alberta), and

the Language Processing Brown Bag (February 8, 2007, Beckman Institute, UIUC, Champaign, IL).

We want to thank the five Language Learning anonymous reviewers who evaluated this manuscript,

and our colleagues Gary Dell, Gary Cziko, Tania Ionin, and Melissa Bowles for their invaluable

questions, feedback, and suggestions on previous versions of this work. All remaining errors are

our own.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Silvina Montrul, Department of

Linguistics and Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, MC-176, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL

61801. Internet: [email protected]

Language Learning 58:3, September 2008, pp. 503–553 503

C© 2008 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan

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in infancy. Sixty-nine heritage speakers, 72 second language (L2) learners, and 22 na-tive Spanish speakers were tested on their oral production, written comprehension, andwritten recognition of Spanish gender agreement. Results showed advantages for L2learners in written tasks but advantages for heritage speakers in the oral task. We discussthe significance of these findings for SLA and heritage language acquisition.

Keywords grammatical competence; production; comprehension; heritage speakers;L2 acquisition; incomplete acquisition; Critical Period Hypothesis

A classic and ongoing debate in SLA concerns the nature of second language(L2) grammars and the limits of ultimate attainment in the L2. A typical ap-proach to these questions has been to compare and contrast first language (L1)acquisition by monolingual children and L2 acquisition by adults. Both L1 andL2 learners must build an abstract mental linguistic system based on input. How-ever, the outcome of the acquisition process is quite different. L1 acquisitionby normally developing children is typically successful and complete, whereasthe outcome of adult L2 acquisition is variable and often incomplete. Due to avariety of factors, complete L2 acquisition is not guaranteed in adulthood.

To account for these differential outcomes, some researchers subscribe toa representational deficit view of L2 acquisition, such as, among others, theNo Parameter Setting Hypothesis (Clahsen & Muysken, 1986; Meisel, 1997),the Incompleteness Hypothesis (Schachter, 1990), the Fundamental DifferenceHypothesis (Bley-Vroman, 1989, 1990), the Failed Functional Features Hypoth-esis (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), and, most recently, the Interpretability Hypothesis(Tsimpli & Dimitrakopulou, 2007) proposed within the framework of Univer-sal Grammar (UG). Similar overall views are also held by researchers workingwithin other cognitive and neurolinguistic perspectives (DeKeyser, 2000, 2003;Long, 2007; Paradis, 2004; Ullman, 2001). The main assumption of the rep-resentational deficit position is that L1 and L2 acquisition are fundamentallydifferent. Whereas L1 acquisition is guided by UG or some sort of implicit mech-anism depending on the theoretical approach, past a critical period, L2 learnersno longer have access to UG and the implicit mechanisms. Consequently, L2learners use domain-general problem-solving cognitive abilities rather than animplicit (linguistic) mechanism to build a grammatical representation of theL2. Regardless of theoretical framework, all of these researchers agree on theassumption that there are maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. Judgedfrom linguistic performance in the L2, incomplete acquisition and impairedlinguistic representations in adults are largely ascribed to an onset of acquisi-tion around or after puberty. Therefore, acquiring an L2 late has consequencesfor the linguistic, neurological, and cognitive mechanisms that subserve the

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relatively fast, effortless, and eventually successful language acquisition thattypically occurs in childhood.1

The representational deficit position contrasts with full access accounts ofgenerative L2 acquisition research, such as the Full Access Hypothesis (Ep-stein, Flynn & Martohardjono, 1996), the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothe-sis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), and the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis(Prevost & White, 2000). Full access accounts differ from the representationaldeficit view in the assumptions about the role of age, the nature of linguisticrepresentations, and potential ultimate attainment. The full access position em-phasizes similarities between L1 and L2 acquisition, downplays the existenceof maturational constraints, and claims that parameter resetting and full accessto UG are possible regardless of age of acquisition. Although proponents of thisview recognize that L1 and L2 acquisition are different due to the fact that the L1representation plays a role in the L2 acquisition process, they disagree with therepresentational deficit view on how fundamental or qualitative the differencesactually are. A specific claim of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis,for example, is that linguistic performance underestimates linguistic compe-tence. Abstract linguistic knowledge of the L2, like that acquired in L1 acqui-sition, is present but not always behaviorally accessible during performance ina given task due to a production or a processing problem. In other words, theproblem is not in the abstract grammatical representations per se but in themechanisms that access grammatical representations, especially during oralproduction.

If incompleteness is a fundamentally different feature of adult L2 acqui-sition, as the representational deficit view maintains, one must ask whetherincomplete acquisition is indeed unique to the postpuberty L2 learner. In fact,it is not. All developing grammars—monolingual, bilingual, or L2 grammars—are by definition “temporarily” incomplete. However, unlike L1 grammars, L2grammars can be “permanently” incomplete or fossilized, and the question be-comes whether permanent incompleteness or “stabilization” (Long, 2003) is dueto child-adult differences, as many researchers contend (Bley-Vroman, 1990;Clahsen & Muysken, 1986; De Keyser, 2002, 2003; Long, 1990, 2003, 2007).An emerging body of research on early bilingual speakers of ethnic-minoritylanguages has shown that these heritage language speakers also fail to acquireage-appropriate full linguistic competence in the heritage language—their L1(Montrul, 2002, 2004a, 2005; Polinsky, in press, 2007; Silva-Corvalan 1994,2003; Valdes, 1995)—suggesting that stabilization of an L1 is also possible inearly bilingualism. Interestingly, some studies have shown that the outcome ofincomplete acquisition of a heritage language largely resembles different stages

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and/or end states of L2 acquisition (Bruhn de Garavito, 2002; Kim, Montrul& Yoon, in press; Montrul, 2006). However, stabilization of an early-acquiredL1 grammar in a dual-language environment raises the question of whetherincomplete acquisition in L2 learners and in the L1 of heritage speakers isfundamentally different in nature.

Heritage language acquisition is both similar to and different from L1 andL2 acquisition (Montrul, 2006, in press). Like L1-acquiring children, heritagespeakers are exposed to the heritage language at home from birth and receivenaturalistic input from their caregivers. Depending on when exposure to themajority language begins and on the amount of exposure the child receives inboth the majority and heritage language, many heritage speakers develop basicknowledge of the heritage language at a young age. Like monolingual children,these bilingual children also go through predictable stages in their linguisticdevelopment, but they also share many features with adult L2 learners that setthem apart from L1 learners. For example, heritage language learners receivevariable input in their L1, depending on how many members of the family speakthe heritage language to the child, and when the majority language is introducedin the home. Due to these different linguistic experiences, heritage languagelearners form a linguistically heterogeneous group (Kanno, Hasegawa, Ikeda,Ito, & Long, 2008; Kondo-Brown, 2005; Valdes, 1995), and many of themresemble L2 learners. For example, like L2 language learners, heritage languagelearners also make transfer errors from the majority language, and becauseinput and use of the heritage language are variable, many of these speakersfail to develop full linguistic ability in the heritage language: As children, theirgrammars might end up stabilized and incomplete, and nativelike attainmentof the heritage language in these speakers when they reach adulthood is notguaranteed either (Lipski, 1993; Montrul, 2002; Polinsky, 1997; Silva-Corvalan,2003). Finally, as in L2 acquisition, motivation, linguistic identity, and otheraffective factors play a more significant role in heritage language developmentbeyond childhood than they play in monolingual acquisition (Carreira, 2004;Potowski, 2002; Valdes, 1995).

A crucial difference that sets apart heritage language speakers from bothL1 and L2 learners, however, is experience with academic literacy and formalinstruction in the heritage language. L1 learners attend school in their nativelanguage and develop literacy and metalinguistic skills. L2 learners typicallylearn the L2 in a classroom setting, through a heavy emphasis on reading andwriting, and they often have fewer opportunities to speak or participate in real-life conversations. By contrast, heritage language speakers are often schooled

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in the majority language, and many have little or no literacy experience in theirL1 until later in life, when they enroll in classes to relearn the heritage languagein a formal setting.

Given this background, understanding differences and similarities betweenpostpuberty L2 learners (late bilinguals) and heritage speakers of minority lan-guages (early bilinguals) is crucial to inform theories of L2 representation anddevelopment, on the one hand, and to identify the factors that contribute todifferential outcomes in early bilingualism, on the other. In this article, weinvestigate whether heritage speakers have advantages over postpuberty L2learners due to both different age of onset and context of acquisition. Somerecent findings, for example, suggest that due to their early language expe-rience, low-proficiency heritage speakers might have selective advantages indifferent grammatical areas, such as in phonology, but not in morphosyntax(Au, Knightly, Jun, & Oh, 2002), although other studies have found advantagesin aspects of lexical semantics and syntax as well (Montrul, 2005, 2006). Ourstudy focuses on knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish noun phrases, agrammatical domain that is largely mastered by around age 3 in Spanish mono-lingual children but which causes persistent difficulty in adult L2 acquisition(Montrul, 2004b, ch. 2). In this article, we ask whether there are advantages forheritage speakers due to age of onset of bilingualism. Results show that genderagreement remains problematic for both L2 learners and heritage speakers andthe two groups make similar types of errors. The incidence of overall nativelikecompetence, however, is higher in the heritage speaker than in the L2 learnergroup. Results also show selective advantages for the two groups dependingon task and modality, which can be explained by how context and mode ofacquisition impinge on the grammatical competence of these two populationsand the type of linguistic knowledge deployed.

Syntactic Background: Spanish Gender Agreement

The grammatical category gender categorizes nouns into two or more gendersor classes and is part of a native speaker’s linguistic competence (Corbett, 1991).Gender assignment is a lexical property of nouns. In some languages, genderassignment is purely semantically based (e.g., Tamil), whereas in many others,such as Russian, Swahili, French, and Spanish, it is predominantly morphologi-cally and phonologically based (Corbett, 1991). In Spanish, some animate nounsreferring to people and some animals are classified as feminine or masculinebased on the semantic notion of sex or biological gender, as in (1).

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(1) Masculine Femininea. El hombre “man” La mujer “woman”b. El toro “bull” La vaca “cow”c. El perro “dog” La perra “dog”

Although in all of these cases there is a semantic basis for gender assign-ment, in (1a) and (1b) masculine and feminine forms take different lexical roots,whereas in (1c) gender is an inflectional morpheme: an −a ending for feminineand an −o ending for masculine on the root perr−. Inanimate nouns are alsoclassified into masculine or feminine, although, in general, their semantic clas-sification is much more idiosyncratic and complex than that of animate nouns(Ambadiang, 1999).

Gender assignment with animate and inanimate nouns also follows formalrules. Typically, feminine nouns end in the vowel “a” [which can be an inflec-tional morpheme as in senor (masc.)-senora (fem.)] or the last vowel (or wordmarker as in Harris, 1991) of a root (cuello “neck,” cara “face”). Masculinenouns typically end in the vowel “o” as in hijo “son,” caballo “horse,” and libro“book.” Despite these apparent regularities, the system has many exceptions,and although −o and −a are the prototypical masculine and feminine wordmarkers, these morphemes have three other allomorphs or morphological vari-ants; that is, both masculine and feminine nouns can end in the vowel “a” or“o,” in the vowel “e,” or in a consonant, as shown in Table 1. According toHarris, canonical −o masculine-ending nouns and −a feminine-ending nouns

Table 1 Word endings for masculine and feminine Spanish inanimate nouns

Masculine nouns Feminine noun

Word marker Examples ExamplesCanonical −o banco “bank” −a mesa “table”

(inner core) libro “book” cuchara “spoon”Noncanonical −e puente “bridge” −e noche “night”

(outer core) coche “car” leche “milk”−cons. lapiz “pencil” −cons nuez “walnut”

pincel “brush” flor “flower”Exceptions (residue) −a planeta “planet” −o mano “hand”

problema “problem” foto “photograph”

Note. There are also masculine and feminine nouns ending in the vowels “u,” like latribu “the tribe,” el espıritu “the spirit,” and in “i” la bikini “the bikini,” el taxi “thetaxi,” but these are very exceptional in number and frequency. Therefore, nouns withthese endings were not included in the experimental tasks.

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form the “inner core,” or most prototypical cases, whereas noncanonical −eand consonant ending nouns form the “outer core.” Masculine nouns ending in−a and feminine nouns ending in −o, as well as other infrequent exceptionalforms, are the “residue.”

As we have seen, gender assignment is lexical. Yet gender (and number)assignment are manifested syntactically through agreement in the noun phraseand in the verb phrase. In noun phrases, there is gender concord among thenoun, the determiner, and adjectives. Examples (2a) and (2b) show prototypical−o masculine-ending nouns and −a feminine-ending nouns, whereas exam-ples (2c) and (2d) show nonprototypical −o feminine-ending nouns and −amasculine-ending nouns. The examples in (3) show agreement between nounsand adjectives in a verbal phrase.

(2) a. La casa roj-a femininethe-fem house (fem) red-fem“the red house”

b. El auto roj-o masculinethe-masc car (masc) red-masc“the red car”

c. La mano abiert-a femininethat-fem hand (fem) open-fem“the open hand”

d. El mapa confus-o masculinethe-masc map (masc) confusing-masc“the confusing map”

(3) a. La maquina esta rot-a femininethe-fem machine (fem) is broken-fem“The machine is broken.”

b. El piso parece mojad-o masculinethe-masc floor (masc) seems wet-masc“The floor seems wet.”

Whereas nouns in Spanish are lexically specified as belonging to the feminineor masculine classes, one can only determine reliably the classification of anygiven noun, not by its ending but by the morphophonological form of the otheritems in the phrase that agree with the noun.2

Within the syntactic literature, there is agreement that nouns come lexicallydetermined with a gender feature [± feminine] (Carroll, 1989; Carstens, 2000).Gender is an interpretable feature in nouns and an uninterpretable (formal)

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feature in determiners and adjectives, which must be checked through agree-ment (Chomsky, 1995). Others have proposed that gender and number are func-tional categories in the Determiner Phrase or DP, above the noun phrase (Abney,1987; Bernstein, 1993; Picallo, 1991; Ritter, 1991), as shown in (4).

According to Carstens (2000), nouns are inserted in the syntactic tree as thehead of the noun phrase and already have an interpretable gender feature. Thenoun then raises to the AgrP (agreement phrase) and covertly to D (for deter-miner) where it checks or values uninterpretable gender features in specifier-head (for noun-adjective concord) and head-head (for determiner-noun con-cord) relations. In these configurations, the interpretable gender features ofnouns are checked with the uninterpretable features of determiners or adjec-tives. Thus, although gender is lexically assigned to nouns, gender agreement inlanguages like Spanish is a syntactic feature-checking operation handled by thesyntax. Consequently, in producing gender agreement, there are two possiblesources of errors for speakers: One is lexical and relates to gender assignmentto nouns (∗la coche roja “the-fem car red-fem”) and the other is syntactic, ly-ing in the gender agreement rule between noun determiner and adjective (∗elcoche roja “the-masc car red-fem”). In the language acquisition literature, thegender of the determiner is often used as evidence for lexical assignment ofgender because it appears that monolingual children use the gender of the de-terminer when predicting the gender of nouns (Carroll, 1989; Lew-Williams &Fernald, 2008). However, a gender error with the determiner can also be relatedto agreement and not to assignment, although this is very hard to tease apart.By contrast, a mismatch between the gender of the determiner and that of theadjective is often taken as evidence of an agreement, or syntactic, error.

A related property of nominal agreement in Spanish is the availability ofnoun drop or nominal ellipsis (Bernstein, 1993; Liceras, Dıaz & Mongeon,2000; Snyder, Senghas, & Inman, 2001). This phenomenon refers to the fact

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that Spanish nouns can be dropped or omitted in discourse because the referentis recovered from the rich gender and number agreement on the determiner, asshown in (5). Note that this is not possible in English, and the pronoun “one”has to be used.

(5) a. ¿Que flor (fem) te gusta? La roja.“Which flower do you like? The red one.”

b. ¿Que libro (masc) compraste? El de Isabel Allende.“Which book did you buy? The one by Isabel Allende.”

Except for some lexicalized patterns (actor/actress, he/she), English does nothave a noun classification system based on gender like French or Spanish. Theinherent [±feminine] feature assigned to nouns and the uninterpretable gen-der feature assigned to Ds are parameterized options made available by UG(Franceschina, 2005; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004). Morphologically, mas-culine is the unmarked or default, whereas feminine is the marked form specifiedfor a gender feature (Harris, 1991; McCarthy, 2007). If crucial syntactic differ-ences between Spanish and English noun phrases have to do with the availabilityof an uninterpretable gender feature in Spanish, then not only does acquiringSpanish gender entail learning how to classify newly acquired words and makeagreement with determiners and adjectives in the syntax, but it also involvesrecognizing the agreement features of nouns in noun drop structures.

Acquisition of Gender in SLA and Early Bilingualism

Longitudinal studies of spontaneous production and cross sectional experimen-tal studies show that by age three monolingual Spanish-speaking children mas-ter gender agreement in noun phrases with almost 100% accuracy (HernandezPina, 1984; Perez Pereira, 1991).3 Noun drop is also mastered before the age of3 (Snyder et al., 2001). Agreement with determiners emerges before agreementwith adjectives, and some overgeneralization errors of masculine to feminineforms are typical before that age. However, gender marking and agreement causepersistent difficulty for L2 learners, especially in spontaneous and elicited oralproduction, even at advanced levels of proficiency. This has been documentedin L2 Spanish (Fernandez, 1999; Franceschina, 2005; Hawkins & Franceschina,2004; McCarthy, 2007), L2 French (Carroll, 1989; Dewaele & Veronique, 2001;Gess & Herschensohn, 2001; Granfeldt, 2000; Guillelmon & Grosjean, 2001),and L2 Dutch (Sabourin, Stowe, & de Haan, 2006). L2 learners whose L1lacks grammatical gender find gender agreement more difficult to master thanlearners whose L1 has gender (Franceschina; Sabourin et al.).

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Both Carroll (1989), and Hawkins and Franceschina (2004) claim that prob-lems in English-speaking learners of languages with gender is related to matu-rational constraints (i.e., the representational deficit view), although the specificdetails of their accounts differ somewhat. For Carroll (pp. 573–574), the mainproblem lies in lexical assignment: After age 5, the universal feature of gen-der distinction “atrophies” and disappears for those speakers whose L1 has nogrammatical gender system. To Hawkins and Franceschina, on the other hand,it is the syntactic mechanism for gender agreement (the uninterpretable genderfeature) that fossilizes in postpuberty L2 learners due to a critical period effect.If uninterpretable gender features are absent in the L1, adult learners of a gender-marked language will not proceed beyond the stage of probabilistic selectionof determiner forms on the basis of noun phonology. By contrast, proponentsof the full access account, such as White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska-MacGregor,and Leung (2004), contend that it is possible to overcome the blueprint imposedby the L1: Speakers of non-gender-marking languages can indeed acquire theuninterpretable gender feature active in the L2.

A series of very recent studies on the acquisition of gender in L2 Spanishwithin the generative framework have been debating these issues. Franceschina(2001) reported on a case study of a Spanish L2 speaker deemed to have reachedthe end state of L2 acquisition, but whose gender agreement performance inspoken Spanish does not reach near the 95–100% accuracy mark typical ofnative speakers. Analysis of several hours of naturalistic speech showed thatMartin was 100% accurate on noun endings, but agreement on adjectives, arti-cles, pronouns, and demonstratives ranged from 85% to 92% accuracy. Martinmade more errors of overgeneralizing masculine gender on adjectives whennouns were feminine (82.86%) than vice versa (17.14%). The same trend wasobserved with articles: 83.3% of errors involved masculine articles with femi-nine nouns, rather than masculine nouns with feminine articles (16.7%). On thebasis of these results Franceschina argued that there is permanent impairment atthe level of formal features in Martin’s grammatical representation of Spanish,supporting the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis.

If difficulties with gender agreement are related to the inability to acquireabstract formal features represented in the learners’ L1, then one would expectlearners whose L1 shares the same features with the L2 not to have any dif-ficulties. Bruhn de Garavito and White (2003) investigated the L2 acquisitionof gender in Spanish by French-speaking learners and compared their resultswith those of Hawkins’s (1998) English-speaking learners of L2 French. Theresults of the French-speaking learners of Spanish and of the English learners ofFrench were in fact very similar, with both groups making around 30% gender

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errors. Bruhn de Garavito and White supported the Missing Surface InflectionHypothesis and claimed that L2 learners have the feature gender represented intheir grammars at an abstract syntactic level. Gender errors are a mere produc-tion or assembly problem, not a representational deficit at the level of formalfeatures (see also Lardiere, 2006).

Because these studies were based exclusively on oral production, White et al.(2004) developed a comprehension-based experiment to test that gender fea-tures are intact at the level of interpretation. The task capitalized on the assumedindirect relationship between noun drop and gender and number agreement, asshown in (5). Participants were native speakers of French and English learningSpanish (low, intermediate, and advanced proficiency levels) and completed asemispontaneous oral production task in addition to the written comprehen-sion task. Results were consistent across the two tasks and showed that theintermediate and advanced groups performed above 90% accuracy on gender;overgeneralization errors involving masculine agreement with feminine nounswere evident in the two tasks. The low-proficiency English-speaking learnersof Spanish were the least accurate, but both the English- and French-speakingadvanced learners did not differ from the Spanish native speakers in compre-hension or production. White et al. argued that these results are incompatiblewith the Failed Formal Features Hypothesis: Gender features are acquirable inan L2 irrespective of age of acquisition (cf. Franceschina, 2005).

Finally, McCarthy (2007) proposed the Morphological UnderspecificationHypothesis (MUSH) to account for systematic and unidirectional error patternsobserved in L2 grammars. It appears that in the nominal agreement domain, thegreat majority of errors involve the substitution of a default (underspecified)form, which is masculine for Spanish, in place of the morphologically markedor specified feminine form. McCarthy conducted a series of production andcomprehension experiments with intermediate and advanced English-speakingL2 learners of Spanish. Results showed that the L2 learners made around 20%gender agreement errors with determiners, adjectives, and clitic pronouns inboth modalities. In all cases, errors were predominantly substituting mascu-line for feminine forms. Because the overextension of default masculine formsoccurs in both production and comprehension, McCarthy also concluded thatthe problem with gender for adult L2 learners is representational, not simplya production problem contra Bruhn de Garavito and White (2003) and Whiteet al. (2004).

To summarize thus far, recent studies on gender agreement from the gen-erative perspective are inconclusive as to whether it is possible for speakersof a language that does not grammaticalize gender to acquire uninterpretable

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gender features in the L2 past a critical age. Whereas in some studies residualerrors with gender appear to be only in production, other studies show thaterrors persist in speakers whose L1 does not grammaticalize gender, regardlessof task and modality. Thus, there is still debate as to whether the acquisition ofgender is subject to a critical period effect in postpuberty L2 acquisition.

The purpose of this study is to compare knowledge of gender in adult L2learners and Spanish heritage speakers—early bilinguals exposed to Spanishin childhood. If adult L2 learners of a [−gender] language like English havedifficulty acquiring gender in the L2 primarily due to the late onset of ac-quisition, as some argue, then one would expect adult early bilinguals, whoreceived input in infancy, to have access to UG and control gender agreement.(Uninterpretable gender features are selected from UG early in childhood.)However, the acquisition process and outcome in bilingual children is hardly asclear and straightforward as generative theory suggests, because the sociopo-litical status of the languages in question affects the linguistic environment andthe input bilingual children receive. Even if L1 acquisition is considered tobe relatively complete by age 3–4 in the generative literature, when minoritylanguage-dominant bilingual children enter school, there is a significant shiftin language use to the majority language, sometimes even at home. This shift inlanguage use can significantly affect the stability of the L1 system acquired inearly childhood, such that sequential bilinguals can undergo minority language(L1) attrition once instruction and extensive socialization in the majority lan-guage (L2) starts. Linguistic balance can also be affected in bilingual childrenbrought up speaking the majority and the minority languages since infancy—simultaneous bilinguals—even when these children were using and knew thetwo languages very well at a very young age. If knowledge of the minority lan-guage does not reach age-appropriate (nativelike) proficiency before childrenstart school in the majority language, it runs the risk of remaining incompleteinto adulthood, as the studies of adults suggest (Montrul, 2002; Polinsky, 1997).In short, adult heritage speakers vary significantly in their degree of compe-tence in the heritage language (their L1) (Kanno et al., 2008; Kondo-Brown,2003; Montrul, 2002; Polinsky, 1997; Valdes, 1997). Some factors that affectthe degree of ultimate attainment include age of onset of bilingualism, status ofthe minority language in the society, minority language use in the home, avail-ability of a speech community beyond the home, and schooling, among manyothers. Incomplete command of different aspects of the L1 in adulthood canbe the result of incomplete acquisition in childhood (typical in simultaneousbilinguals) or L1 attrition (more common in sequential bilinguals), dependingon when the structures in question are assumed to be acquired in L1 acquisition.

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Gender agreement appears to be a strong candidate for language loss in alanguage contact situation. Corbett (1991) illustrated the cases of Diyrbal andSouthern Gaelic and Polinsky (in press) showed that Russian heritage speakershave error rates ranging from 5% to 20%, especially with feminine and irregularneuter forms. As for Spanish, there is some evidence for incomplete acquisitionin both child and adult early bilinguals. Barrena’s (1997) longitudinal study ofa Basque-Spanish simultaneous bilingual child suggested that by the end ofthe data collection period, when the child was 3;00, the gender agreementsystem of Spanish was not completely mastered. Anderson (1999) documentedlongitudinally incomplete acquisition and L1 attrition in two Spanish-Englishbilingual siblings who moved to the United States from Puerto Rico. When datacollection started, the older sibling was 6;7 years old and the younger sibling was4;7. At the time of the first recording, the older sister produced gender agreement100% correctly, but 2 years after living in the United States she was producing5.8% errors. The younger sister produced almost no gender agreement errorsat the beginning of the study but showed a steady increase to 25%, 17.4%, and18.2% errors in the last three sessions. Other studies of school-age Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States confirm that Spanish heritagechildren, in general, do not produce gender marking with 100% accuracy likeage-matched monolingual children (Merino, 1983; Montrul & Potowski, 2007;Mueller Gathercole, 2002; Sanchez-Sadek, Kiraithe, & Villareal, 1975).

Although, to our knowledge, no comprehensive studies of gender agree-ment in Spanish heritage speakers exist, there is some evidence that the prob-lems noted with bilingual children persist into adulthood. Noting the errors in(6) produced by heritage speakers, Lipski (1993, p. 161) wrote that “vestigialSpanish speakers are aligned with second language learners as regards adjec-tive inflection, for errors of gender and number concord are quite frequent (inproduction).”

(6) a. ∗Mi blusa es blanco. (blanca)my blouse-fem is white-masc

“My blouse is white.”b. ∗Tenemos un casa alla. (una casa)

we have a-masc house-fem there“We have a house there.”

c. ∗¿Cual es tu favorito parte? (favorita)which is your favorite-masc part-fem

“Which is your favorite part?”

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However, are heritage speakers similar to L2 learners as Lipski (1993) ob-served? Recent research findings on this question are also contradictory. Au et al.(2002) tested knowledge of phonology and several aspects of morphosyntax,among them gender agreement, in 15 adult L2 learners and 15 Spanish her-itage speakers of very low proficiency in Spanish. Morphosyntactic knowledgewas investigated through oral elicited production and judgment tasks. Resultsshowed that the heritage speakers scored closer to native-speaker controls inmeasures of phonology and pronunciation but were not significantly differentfrom L2 learners in morphosyntax. Other studies comparing aspects of syntaxand lexical semantics in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers suggest thatthere are both similarities and differences between these groups, dependingon proficiency level, grammatical area investigated, and task (Montrul, 2004a,2005).

In conclusion, the issue of why gender agreement is problematic for adultL2 learners and what it means for theories of L2 knowledge as a functionof age continues to be intensely debated. Emerging research on incompletechild and adult heritage language acquisition suggests that gender agreementis a vulnerable grammatical area in early bilingualism as well. This raises thequestion of whether the nature of incomplete linguistic representations in L2learners and heritage speakers are similar or different in degree and/or type.

Research Questions and Hypotheses

The findings that gender agreement might not be acquired completely in adultL2 and early bilingual grammars and perennial debates on the issue of age inbilingualism motivated the following research questions for the present study.

1. Will there be differences in the overall written comprehension and oralproduction of gender agreement in noun phrases between adult L2 learnersand proficiency-matched Spanish heritage speakers?

2. If L2 learners and heritage speakers make gender agreement errors, willthere be differences between the two groups with respect to the patternsof errors in terms of gender (masculine, feminine), domain of agreement(determiner, adjective), and noun ending (canonical vs. noncanonical)?

We discussed two broad hypotheses in the field of generative L2acquisition—the representational deficit view and the full access view—thatdiffer in their assumptions about the role of age and their predictions aboutpossible linguistic outcomes. Although not formulated with heritage speak-ers in mind, in this study we extend these theories and make predictions to

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understand the nature of linguistic representations in heritage language acqui-sition. The respective merits of these theories in the grammatical domain ofgender agreement will be evaluated in light of the results observed.

If the syntactic mechanism for gender agreement in gender-marking lan-guages is subject to a critical period effect, as the representational deficit posi-tion maintains, then one would expect heritage speakers to be similar to nativespeakers and better than L2 learners, especially because gender agreement is ac-quired early in childhood. Within this broad view, the Failed Functional FeaturesHypothesis (Hawkins & Chan, 1997) predicts poor performance by L2 learners,but not necessarily by heritage speakers, on gender in both comprehension andproduction tasks, with errors being random and unsystematic (see discussionof Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004, in the previous section). McCarthy’s (2007)Morphological Underspecification Hypothesis, on the other hand, predicts sys-tematicity of errors, such that default masculine forms will replace specifiedfeminine forms in all agreement domains, in comprehension and production.4

The alternative hypothesis is that the syntactic mechanism for gender agree-ment is not subject to a critical period, as the full access account maintains. Then,L2 learners and heritage speakers should be as accurate as native speakers withgender in Spanish. If errors with gender are due to a production problem at theinterface of syntax and morphology, as the Missing Surface Inflection Hypoth-esis predicts, then L2 learners will display systematic errors only in production,not in comprehension. It is an open question whether heritage speakers willalso make similar errors in production only.

These research questions and hypotheses were investigated through threerelated experiments, which are described next.

Experiment 1

In this experiment we investigated the comprehension of gender features to seewhether heritage speakers are more accurate than L2 learners. To answer thisquestion, we followed a methodology matched closely to that used by Whiteet al. (2004), which capitalized on the availability of noun drop or nominalellipsis in Spanish, as discussed in the Syntactic Background: Spanish GenderAgreement section.

MethodParticipantsThe data reported in this article are part of a research program comparingL2 learners and heritage speakers on different grammatical areas of Spanish(vocabulary, phonology, syntax, morphology).5 A total of 72 L2 learners of

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Spanish, 69 Spanish heritage speakers, and 22 monolingually raised nativespeakers of Spanish participated in the study. All completed a linguistic back-ground questionnaire and a short Spanish proficiency test. The L2 learnerswere all native speakers of English, used English at home as children, andhad started acquiring Spanish as an L2 around puberty in high school (agerange: 12–20 years). At the time of the data collection, they were enrolled inSpanish language classes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Some of the most advanced learners in this group were graduate students andSpanish language instructors at the same university with a very high commandof the Spanish language. The mean age for this group was 22.7 years (range:18–31 years).

Although heritage speakers form a heterogeneous group, every effort wasmade to reduce variability in this group as much as possible by focusing onindividuals with a particular linguistic profile. In order to be included in theexperiment, all of the heritage speakers had to be of Mexican descent be-cause this is the largest represented Spanish-speaking group in the Champaign-Urbana area. Furthermore, all heritage speakers had to be born and schooledin the United States and had to have been exposed to English before the ageof 5 (preschool). We specifically excluded heritage speakers who might haveimmigrated in childhood and might have received schooling in Mexico. Pre-vious studies have shown that bilingual individuals with this profile have amore solid command of Spanish than simultaneous or near-simultaneous bilin-guals, who, in turn, appear to be more similar to L2 learners (Montrul, 2002).Like the L2 learners, all heritage speakers were graduate and undergraduatestudents at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and were eithertaking or had taken Spanish language classes. Many of the heritage speakerswere enrolled in the same classes as the L2 learners and had some literacy inSpanish.

Half of the heritage speakers reported that Spanish was their mother tongue,35% reported English, and the remaining 8% reported both languages. As forlanguage used at home in childhood, 56% reported use of both Spanish andEnglish and 44% reported only Spanish. Eight-eight percent of the participantsreported that both parents were from Mexico; for the other 12%, one parent wasfrom Mexico and the other one was born in the United States. Eighty percentof the parents spoke Spanish with the participants at home, 5% used English,and 15% used both languages. However, 66% of participants spoke Spanishwith parents, 16% spoke English when spoken to in Spanish, and the rest spokeboth languages. All of the heritage speakers had siblings, ranging from age 1to 9 years, and 14 of them (20%) lived with a Spanish-speaking grandparent.

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Only 20% of the participants spoke only Spanish with their siblings, 42% spokeonly English, and 38% spoke both languages. Despite the fact that all heritagespeakers continued to speak Spanish throughout their lives, they rated theirSpanish abilities between 1 and 4 (mean: 3.9) on a self-rating scale with maxi-mum 5 (native-speaker command), whereas they rated their English between 4and 5 (mean: 4.88). Despite these ratings, 48% felt that they still knew Spanishas a native language, and 52% considered Spanish to be an L2. One hundredpercent of the heritage speakers wanted to improve their ability in Spanish forboth personal and professional reasons and to learn things about the language(grammar, vocabulary, and spelling) that they had never learned previously.

The monolingually raised Spanish native speakers formed the comparisonor baseline group and consisted of native speakers from Spain, Argentina, andMexico. Half of the subjects in this group were tested abroad in their countriesof origin and the rest were recent arrivals in the United States (range: 1–3years of length of residence). Speakers of these regional varieties were testedbecause these dialects are representative of the Spanish spoken by the instructorswho teach many of the Spanish language courses at the University of Illinois,and both L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to these varieties inthe classrooms. Furthermore, with respect to gender agreement, there are fewlexical differences among these varieties, but these were controlled for in thetasks as explained later. As we will see, all native speakers performed at ceilingboth in the written proficiency measure and in the experimental tasks, and therewere no differences between speakers of different regional varieties (Argentina,Spain, Mexico) or differences between native speakers tested in the UnitedStates versus those tested abroad. The mean age for this group was 29.82 years(range: 21–57 years).

According to previous work (Montrul, 2004a, 2005), the likelihood of find-ing differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers depends on pro-ficiency level. However, as Valdes (1995) has repeatedly voiced, classifyingheritage speakers into proficiency levels is difficult to do with current profi-ciency measures developed with L2 learners in mind. It has been shown thatheritage speakers do not neatly fit the proficiency categories identified for L2learners, at least with the ACTFL oral interview. Although we agree with Valdeson the uniqueness of the heritage speaker population, it is our position that thesuitability of existing available written measures developed for L2 learners tomeasure proficiency in heritage speakers is an empirical question and deservesfurther study. Furthermore, if we want to compare L2 learners and heritagespeakers, we need to have a basic measure to equalize the groups at the outsetand see how that measure correlates or not with other aspects of the groups’

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Native Speakers L2 Learners Heritage Speakers

Groups

50.00

40.00

30.00

20.00

Pro

fici

ency

Figure 1 Proficiency scores by groups.

linguistic performance. Therefore, all subjects, including the native-speakercontrols, took a short written Spanish proficiency test (vocabulary part of anMLA test and cloze part of the DELE test), the same test used in several otherstudies of L2 learners and heritage speakers (McCarthy, 2007; Montrul, 2005;White et al., 2004). The maximum number of points on this test was 50. AsFigure 1 shows, all of the native speakers scored above 90% (M = 48.5, SD =1, range: 45–50), whereas the experimental groups scored around 70% (L2learners M = 35.34, SD = 9.24, range: 16–50; heritage speakers M = 36.88,SD = 8.17, range: 15–48). Reliability statistics, computed using Cronbach’salpha, were found to be high (r = .84) for the heritage speakers and the L2learners. Because the variance of the native-speaker group was significantlydifferent from the variance of the experimental groups [Levene’s test of equal-ity of variance, F(2,158) = 21.779, p < .0001], scores on the proficiency test forthe L2 learners and the heritage speakers were compared with an independentsamples t-test. Results indicated that the two groups did not differ from eachother, t(139) = −1.339, p = .183.

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Task and MaterialsThe task consisted of 45 sentences, 32 of which were target sentences and 13 dis-tractors. The target sentences included structures with noun drop, manipulatedgender and number, and exemplified four noun conditions (eight sentences percondition): masculine singular, masculine plural, feminine singular, and femi-nine plural.6 The sentences were presented in the context of a situation in whichthe subject completing the task overheard a conversation between two peoplewho were going on a trip and were packing their suitcases. They were discussingwhat to include in the suitcases and other aspects of the trip.

ProcedureThe task was untimed and was conducted on a computer via a Web interface.The randomized list of 45 sentences was presented one by one on the computerscreen, each followed by three pictures. Participants had to read the overheardconversation they were asked to imagine and were required to choose the pictureto which each sentence referred. They could only choose the correct referenton the basis of the gender and number of the pictures. Because there is dialectalvariation with some names for objects and their gender among different varietiesof Spanish (e.g., socks is “las medias” in Argentina but “los calcetines” inSpain, tennis shoes are “las zapatillas” in Argentina but “los tenis” in Mexico),a difference between our version of this task and the original developed byWhite et al. (2004) is that in our task the pictures were accompanied by thelabels of the objects, as the example in (7) shows.

(7) “No quiero llevar las de ese color.”no I-want bring the-fem of that color“I don want to bring the ones of that color.”

Distractor items, which did not manipulate gender agreement, were includedto make sure the subjects understood the task and were paying attention to

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their answers. See Appendix A for the target nouns. (Noun ending was notmanipulated in this task.)

ResultsCorrect responses on this task were assigned one point and incorrect responsesreceived a score of 0, and percentage accuracy on masculine and feminineconditions was calculated for each subject. Singular and plural conditions werecollapsed for each gender because number is not the focus of our study. Themonolingual native speakers performed almost at ceiling in this experiment(M =99.05, SD=1.79), as shown in Figure 2, confirming that gender agreementis not a problem for native speakers. For this reason, together with the fact thatour main interest in this study is the comparison between L2 learners andheritage speakers, all statistical comparisons exclude the native-speaker group.

The scatter plots in Figure 3 show the individual distribution and the corre-lation between the proficiency test and the overall scores on the Written PictureIdentification Task for the L2 learners and the heritage speakers. The scatterplots in Figure 3 show that many more L2 learners who scored below 80%

Native Speakers L2 Learners Heritage Speakers

Groups

0.40

0.60

0.80

1.00

Ove

rall

Acc

ura

cy

Figure 2 Mean percentage accuracy on gender agreement in the Written Picture Iden-tification Task by group.

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Heritage SpeakersL2 Learners

0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00

Overall Accuracy

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

Pro

fici

ency

0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00

Overall Accuracy

Figure 3 Correlations between overall percentage accuracy on Written Picture Identi-fication Task and proficiency scores.

Table 2 Mean percentage accuracy and standard deviation on the Written Picture Iden-tification Task by gender

Masculine Feminine

Groups N M SD M SD

L2 learners 72 91.1 12.6 88.6 18.5Heritage speakers 67 83.6 15.9 82.9 20.1

(less than 40/50) on the proficiency test than heritage speakers scored above80% accuracy in the Written Picture Identification Task. One-tailed Pearsoncorrelations were highly significant for the two groups, but as the visual spreadof the dots suggests, the correlation was more robust for the heritage speakers(r = .614, p < .0001) than for the L2 learners (r = .319, p < .0001).

Table 2 looks at performance on noun drop sentences by gender, because atheoretically significant and recurrent finding in the acquisition of inflectionalmorphology is that learners with incomplete knowledge of the language tend tooverextend default or less morphologically marked forms to the marked form.In Spanish, masculine is considered the default, and learners are typically mostincorrect with feminine gender.

A repeated-measures factorial ANOVA with group (heritage speakers, L2learners) as the between-group variable, gender (feminine, masculine) as the

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within-group variable, and proficiency scores as covariate showed a main effectfor gender, F(1,138) = 12.788, p < .0001, η2

p = .087, because the two groupswere more accurate on masculine than on feminine. There was a main effect forgroup, F(1,138) = 10.489, p < .002: The L2 learners were overall more accuratethan the heritage speakers, as graphically shown in Figure 2 and indicatedby a medium effect size (d = 0.40). The covariate—proficiency scores—wassignificantly related to the groups’ accuracy, F(1,138)=44.106, p< .0001,η2

p =.248, and there was a Gender × Proficiency interaction, F(1,138) = 10.302,p < .002, η2

p = .071. The slopes of the covariate (beta values) for masculine(ß = .07) and for feminine gender (ß = .10) indicate a positive relationshipbetween the groups’ performance on the proficiency test and their accuracy onthe Written Picture Identification Task.

To summarize, the results of this experiment show that L2 learners andheritage speakers made more gender errors identifying feminine nouns thanmasculine nouns and matching them with sentences with noun drop. How-ever, many more low- and intermediate-proficiency L2 learners than heritagespeakers performed above 80% accuracy on this task. Contrary to the repre-sentational deficit view, L2 learners were more accurate than Spanish heritagespeakers, with gender agreement marking on determiners when interpretingwritten sentences with null nominals.

Experiment 2

Whereas Experiment 1 tested recognition of nouns on the basis of gender agree-ment on determiners and adjectives in noun drop structures, Experiment 2 testedthe opposite: written recognition of the correct masculine or feminine form ofdeterminers and adjectives based on the ending of the noun. As in Experiment1, we wanted to see if heritage speakers would be more accurate than L2 learn-ers at recognizing the correct form of gender agreement by manipulating otherlinguistic variables of interest: domain of agreement (determiner, adjective)and noun ending (canonical, noncanonical). Participants were the same as inExperiment 1.

MethodTask and MaterialsThe task was a Written Gender Recognition task consisting of a passage with40 gaps in determiner and adjective positions. The passage was taken fromthe Spanish textbook Sabıas que. . .? Beginning Spanish (VanPatten, Lee, &Ballman, 2000) and adapted for the experiment. Participants were instructed toselect the correct form of the article or adjective. An excerpt of the task follows.

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El hogar electronico

(1) Los / Las llaves de la puerta, los televisores de 625 lıneas y las ruidosaslavadoras se quedaran (2) obsoletos / obsoletas en la proxima decada,cuando el 60 por ciento de (3) el / la poblacion de (4) los / las paıses (5)desarrollados / desarrolladas dependa de (6) las / los telecomunicaciones.

The electronic home

“(The) door keys, 625 line TV sets and noisy dishwashers will be obsoletein the next decade when 60 percent of (the) population of (the) developingcountries will depend on (the) telecommunications.”

To test domain of agreement, there were 20 determiner gaps and 20 adjectivegaps, half masculine and half feminine in each condition. To test the effect ofnoun ending on gender recognition, half of the nouns in each gender group hadcanonical endings and the other half had noncanonical endings.

ProcedureAs in Experiment 1, the test was presented on a computer monitor and useda Web interface. Participants were asked to choose from a drop-down box thecorrect gender form of the determiner or adjective. The task was not timed, butit took participants 10–15 min to complete it.

ResultsCorrect responses received a 1 and incorrect responses 0. Mean percentagescores for each condition and overall were examined for each group. The mono-lingual control group obtained an overall accuracy score of 97.42% (SD = 2.64,range: 91.87–100). Figure 4 displays the box plots with the overall accuracyscores for the native speakers and the experimental groups, whereas the scatterplots in Figure 5 illustrate the distribution of individual subjects in the L2 learnerand heritage speaker groups by proficiency and accuracy in the Written GenderRecognition Task. One-tailed Pearson correlations were highly significant forthe two groups but stronger in the heritage speaker group (r = .807, p < .0001)than in the L2 learners group (r = .653, p < .0001).

To investigate whether accuracy was different for feminine and masculinegender, by domain of agreement and by noun ending, and how these vari-ables interacted with each other, results were submitted to a factorial ANOVAwith repeated measures with gender (masculine, feminine), agreement form(determiner, adjective), and noun ending (canonical, noncanonical) as within-subjects factors, group as the between-subjects factor, and proficiency scoresas covariate. Results showed a main effect for gender, F(1,138) = 17.246,

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Native Speakers L2 Learners Heritage Speakers

Groups

70.00

80.00

90.00

100.00

Ove

rall

Acc

ura

cy

Figure 4 Overall accuracy on the Written Gender Recognition Task by groups.

0.60 0.70 0.80 0.90 1.00

Overall Accuracy

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

Pro

fici

ency

Heritage SpeakersL2 Learners

0.60 0.70 0.80 0.90 1.00

Overall Accuracy

Figure 5 Correlations between overall percentage accuracy on Written Gender Recog-nition Task and proficiency scores.

p < .0001, η2p = .111, indicating that overall accuracy on masculine—the

default form—was higher than on feminine. There was also a main effect fordomain of agreement, F(1,138) = 20.140, p < .0001, η2

p = .127: Gender agree-ment accuracy on determiners was higher than on adjectives. The main effect

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for noun ending, F(1,138) = 99.580, p < .0001, η2p = .419, showed that the two

groups were overall more accurate on gender agreement with canonical endingnouns than with noncanonical ending nouns. Proficiency scores, the covariate,were significantly related to the groups’ accuracy, F(1,138) = 144.926, p <

.0001, η2p = .512. It interacted with gender, F(1,138) = 14.885, p < .0001,

η2p = .097, domain of agreement, F(1,138) = 8.478, p = 0.004, η2

p = .058, andnoun ending, F(1,138) = 57.819, p < .0001, η2

p = .295. The beta values for ac-curacy on the eight experimental conditions (masculine-determiner-canonical,masculine-determiner-noncanonical, etc.) indicated a positive relationship be-tween proficiency and accuracy on gender agreement by domain of agreementand noun ending. Finally, there was a main effect for group, F(1,138) = 28.745,p < .0001, η2

p = .172. The L2 learners (M = 90.63, SD = 8.5) were more ac-curate than the heritage speakers (M = 85.79, SD = 11.6) and the effect sizewas quite large (d = 1.36). See also Figure 4 for a visual comparison of thegroups. Table 3 shows the results for the four masculine conditions and Table 4displays the feminine conditions. The statistical analysis also showed a genderby group interaction, F(1,138) = 12.228, p < .0001, η2

p = .081. The L2 learnerswere slightly more accurate on feminine agreement (92.3%) than on masculine

Table 3 Written Gender Recognition Task: Mean percentage accuracy and standarddeviation on masculine agreement by domain of agreement and noun ending

Determiner Adjective

Canonical Noncanonical Canonical Noncanonical

Groups N M SD M SD M SD M SD

L2 learners 72 97.7 7.6 78.8 22.5 97.5 8.2 85.8 16.2Heritage speakers 67 97.3 6.7 86.3 16.8 91.0 14.3 77.9 19.1

Table 4 Written Gender Recognition Task: Mean percentage accuracy and standarddeviation on feminine agreement by domain of agreement and noun ending

Determiner Adjective

Canonical Noncanonical Canonical Noncanonical

Groups N M SD M SD M SD M SD

L2 learners 72 98.3 6.5 89.1 20.7 88.9 15.3 88.9 22.1Heritage speakers 67 95.3 11.9 87.2 21.2 76.2 21.2 75.0 30.3

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agreement (90.6%), whereas the heritage speakers were more accurate on mas-culine agreement (87.5%) than on feminine (82.4%) agreement. Finally, a do-main of agreement by group interaction, F(1,138) = 41.719, p < .0001, η2

p =.232, indicated that the L2 learners were as accurate with agreement on de-terminers (91.7%) as they were with agreement on adjectives (91.2%), but theheritage speakers were more accurate with agreement on determiners (98.8%)than with agreement on adjectives (79.1%).

In common with the results of Experiment 1, the results of Experiment 2showed an overall advantage for L2 learners over heritage speakers in writtenrecognition, contrary to the predictions of both the representational deficit hy-pothesis and the full access hypothesis. Although the L2 learners made fewererrors than the heritage speakers, the patterns of errors made by the L2 learnersare systematic: Feminine is more affected than masculine, and agreement withadjectives is more affected than agreement with determiners. The two groupsmade more errors with noncanonical than with canonical ending nouns.

Experiment 3

On the basis of the results of Experiments 1 and 2 with written interpretationand recognition, will heritage speakers also be less accurate than L2 learners inoral production? To answer this question, the same participants were asked todescribe pictures using determiner + noun + adjective NPs in an Oral PictureDescription Task.

MethodMaterials and TaskThe task consisted of a series of 65 photographs, presented one by one ina PowerPoint presentation. The stimuli were pictures of people, animals, andobjects. Of the 65 pictures, 50 were target and the remaining 15 were distractors.Of the target nouns, 25 were masculine and 25 were feminine, and withineach gender there were five classes of nouns based on their endings: animatecanonical, inanimate canonical (the inner core in Harris’s 1991 classification asdescribed in the Syntactic Background: Spanish Gender Agreement section),−e-ending and consonant-ending nouns (outer core) and opposite word markerending nouns (residue or exceptions). As in the picture identification task ofExperiment 1, the nouns appeared written on each slide, to avoid cases ofpotential dialectal variation (e.g., la banana vs. el platano for “banana,” orla oveja vs. el borrego for “sheep,” etc.). Participants were asked to describewhat they saw in each picture by using the carrier sentence Veo un/una NounAdjective (“I see a Adjective Noun”). An example is shown in Figure 6.

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Figure 6 Example slide presentation and expected response from the Oral Picture De-scription Task.

ProcedureAlthough the task was oral and was performed as fast and spontaneously aspossible by the participants, individual participants’ responses were not timed.All responses were audio-recorded with a Panasonic RR-US360 IC recorderand later transcribed and coded for analysis. The categories coded were correctagreement with determiners and adjectives by noun ending. Correct agreementwith determiners and adjectives received 1 point; incorrect agreement witheither form received a 0 score. (We also noted changes of the head noun, suchas la modela for la modelo “model,” but these were very few). Participants whodid not produce adjectives spontaneously were not included in the statisticalanalysis by conditions.7 This affected 22.7% of the control group, 36.24% ofthe heritage speakers, and 41.67% of the L2 learners. As a result, only 44heritage speakers and 42 L2 learners were retained from the original sample.

ResultsFigure 7 shows overall group results, including the native-speaker group for vi-sual comparison. With the exception of one who scored 98%, all native speakersscored 100% on this task (M = 99.9, SD = 1.82). The scatter plots in Figure 8show the individual distribution of heritage speakers and L2 learners by pro-ficiency and accuracy. Positive correlations between proficiency scores andoverall accuracy on this oral task were significant for the two groups (L2 learn-ers, r = .416, p < .0001; heritage speakers, r = .371, p < .001). The individual

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Native Speakers L2 Learners Heritage Speakers

Groups

50.00

60.00

70.00

80.00

90.00

100.00

Ove

rall

Acc

ura

cy

Figure 7 Overall accuracy in the Oral Picture Description Task by groups.

50.00 60.00 70.00 80.00 90.00 100.00

Overall Accuracy

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

Pro

fici

ency

Sco

re

Heritage SpeakersL2 Learners

50.00 60.00 70.00 80.00 90.00 100.00

Overall Accuracy

Figure 8 Correlations between overall percentage accuracy on the Oral Picture Descrip-tion Task and proficiency scores.

distribution of subjects shows that many more heritage speakers than L2 learnersperformed above 80% accuracy.

A factorial ANOVA with repeated measures was performed on the accuracyscores of the different conditions, with gender (masculine, feminine), agreement

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form (determiner, adjective), and noun ending (animate canonical, animatenoncanonical, −e, opposite [fem −o and masc −a], and consonant) as within-subjects factors, group as a between-subjects factor, and proficiency scores ascovariate. Tables 5 and 6 show accuracy on masculine and feminine agreement,

Table 5 Oral Picture Description Task: Mean accuracy and standard deviation on mas-culine agreement by domain of agreement and noun ending

Heritage speakers L2 learners(n = 42) (n = 44)

Domain ofagreement Noun ending M SD M SD

Determiners −o (anim) 99.1 4.2 98.6 6.8−o (inanim) 100 — 97.6 7.9−e 98.8 4.5 94.7 12.6−consonant 99.4 3.8 94.9 11.4−a 79.1 24.9 71.9 25.6

Adjectives −o (anim) 99.4 3.8 97.3 9.4−o (inanim) 97.3 7.8 94.5 11.8−e 98.7 4.8 95.7 9.5−consonant 92.4 17.7 91.1 22.7−a 83.6 31.4 81.9 33.8

Table 6 Oral Picture Description Task: Mean accuracy and standard deviation on fem-inine agreement by domain of agreement and noun ending

Heritage speakers L2 learners(n = 42) (n = 44)

Domain ofagreement Noun ending M SD M SD

Determiners −a (anim) 95.0 12.3 86.1 20.8−a (inanim) 97.3 10.2 88.6 23.0−e 85.1 26.5 53.7 36.9−consonant 83.3 26.8 59.2 35.5−o 73.4 33.1 63.3 33.9

Adjectives −a (anim) 86.1 22.2 61.4 34.8−a (inanim) 86.1 22.2 65.6 34.5−e 72.8 31.4 36.9 37.4−consonant 75.8 35.7 47.8 30.5−o 70.8 33.4 47.5 32.8

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respectively, with determiners and adjectives. Results showed a main effect forgroup, F(1,83) = 21.816, p < .0001, η2

p = .208, but, as seen in Figure 6, thistime the heritage speakers were significantly more accurate (M = 87.94, SD =11.92) than the L2 learners (M = 74.17, SD = 13.04), and the effect size wasquite large (d = 1.10). The main effect for proficiency, the covariate, was alsosignificant, F(1,83) = 55.807, p < .0001, η2

p = .402, with positive beta valuesfor all conditions. As for the within variables, there was a main effect for gender,F(1,83) = 76.774, p < .0001, η2

p = .481, with higher overall accuracy on mas-culine (93.19%), once again, than on feminine (72.16%), but no main effect fordomain of agreement. The main effect for noun ending, F(4,83) = 13.139, p <

.0001, η2p = .137, indicated that agreement was produced more accurately with

canonical-ending animate nouns (91.97%) than with canonical-ending inani-mate nouns (80.59%). Furthermore, agreement was produced more accuratelywith consonant-ending nouns (88.33%) than with nouns ending in −e (81.76%).Finally, agreement production with exceptional nouns (feminine ending in −oand masculine ending in −a) was the most inaccurate (70.71%). A significantgender by domain of agreement by noun-ending interaction, F(4,83) = 33.337,p < .0001, η2

p = .214, indicated that the L2 learners and heritage speakers weremost inaccurate on gender agreement with adjectives in exceptional-endingfeminine nouns (Table 6).

Error Analysis

We will now examine in more detail the types of errors produced in the Oral Pic-ture Description Task. In producing gender agreement within the noun phrase,speakers can make gender assignment errors or gender agreement errors. Weare assuming that a gender assignment error occurs at the lexical level, whenspeakers incorrectly classify a noun to the opposite gender, but there is agree-ment between the determiner and the adjective, where this agreement, in turn,suggests that the noun has been assigned incorrect gender. Some examples ofassignment errors produced by the L2 and heritage speakers in this study arelisted in (8).

(8) a. ∗Veo a un nariz rojo. (una nariz roja) masculine instead of feminineI see a-masc nose-fem red-masc“I see a red nose.”

b. ∗Veo la mapa amarilla. (el mapa amarillo) feminine instead of masculine

I see the-fem map-masc yellow-fem“I see the yellow map.”

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The source of agreement errors is most likely syntactic, on the other hand, andthese errors can be of two types: correct agreement with the determiner andincorrect agreement with the adjective (

√det N ∗adj), as in (9), or incorrect

agreement with the determiner and correct agreement with the adjective (∗detN

√adj), as in (10).

(9) a. ∗Veo un guante blanca. (√

det N ∗adj) (un guante blanco)I see a-masc glove-masc white-fem“I see a white glove.”

b. ∗Veo una vela encendido. (√

det N ∗adj) (una vela encendida)I see a-fem candle-fem lit-masc“I see a lit candle.”

(10) a. ∗Veo un moto roja. (∗det N√

adj) (una moto roja)I see a-masc motorcycle-fem red-fem“I see a red motorcycle.”

b. ∗Veo el llave antigua. (∗det N√

adj) (la llave antigua)I see the-masc key-fem old-fem“I see the old key.”

We examined all of the errors made by L2 learners (635/3673, 17.28%)and heritage speakers (248/3013, 8.23%) in all utterances containing determin-ers and adjectives. Of the total number of errors of the two groups combined(883), the heritage speakers produced 241, or 28%, of the errors, whereas theL2 learners produced the remaining 642, or 72%. As for the types of errors,47.9% of the errors of the two groups combined were assignment errors and52.09% were agreement errors. Table 7 shows the distribution of errors by type,gender, and group. The distribution of errors in the two groups was very similar:Almost 80% of errors occurred with feminine words and 20% with masculinewords, and this pattern is consistent with the predictions of the Morphologi-cal Underspecification Hypothesis (McCarthy, 2007) and the Missing SurfaceInflection Hypothesis (Prevost & White, 2000). When errors with masculinenouns occur, these are overwhelmingly agreement errors at the level of syn-tax, suggesting that the L2 learners and the heritage speakers correctly classifymasculine words as such in the lexicon. By contrast, many more feminine thanmasculine nouns appear to be incorrectly classified as masculine in the lexicon,especially feminine −o ending nouns, suggesting that default forms also occurat the level of gender assignment, not just agreement.

Figure 9 shows the overall distribution of errors by gender and Table 8 showsthe distribution of errors by noun ending. Once again, the patterns of error

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Table 7 Oral Picture Description Task: Percentage distribution of error types by genderand group

Error types

Assignment Agreement Total

Group Gender % Count % Count % Count

Heritage speakers Masculine 6.2 7/113 33.6 43/128 20.7 50/24128% (241/883) Feminine 93.8 106/113 66.4 85/128 79.3 191/241

L2 learners Masculine 6.5 20/310 27.7 92/332 17.5 112/64272% (642/883) Feminine 93.5 290/310 72.3 240/332 82.5 530/642

90.65

46.46

80.95

45.28

9.35

53.54

19.05

54.72

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Masculine Feminine Masculine Feminine

Heritage speakers L2 learners

Assignment

Agreement

Figure 9 Oral Picture Description Task: Distribution of assignment and agreementerrors by gender.

distribution are very similar for L2 learners and heritage speakers. Agreementerrors were more frequent than assignment errors with masculine nouns ingeneral. On the other hand, more than half of the errors with feminine nounswere assignment errors with noncanonical (−e, −cons) and exceptional ending(−o) words. Because masculine is considered the unmarked or default gender(Harris, 1991), it makes sense for learners to rely on the default when they donot know or cannot retrieve fast enough the gender of feminine nouns duringoral production (see also Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2003, and McCarthy,2007). The fact that the experimental groups also produced more agreement

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Table 8 Oral Picture Description Task: Percentage distribution of error types by genderand noun ending

Heritage speakers L2 learners

Gender Noun ending Assignment Agreement Assignment Agreement

Masculine −o (anim) 0 100 10.5 89.4−o (inanim) 25 75 23.1 76.9−e 0 100 14.3 85.7−consonant 21.7 78.2 26.5 73.5−a 9.3 90.6 19.0 80.9

Feminine −a (anim) 29.3 70.7 22.2 77.8−a (inanim) 29.3 70.7 22.2 77.8−e 71.9 28.1 58.1 41.9−consonant 63.2 36.8 65.8 34.2−o 66.7 33.3 69.8 30.2

errors with feminine than with masculine suggests that masculine is also thedefault gender for determiners and adjectives.

To summarize, the results of Experiment 3 show that in terms of quantityof errors, the heritage speakers were more accurate than L2 learners in thisexperiment, as the experimental hypothesis framed within the deficit view ofL2 acquisition predicted. With respect to error types and their distribution, bothL2 learners and heritage speakers did not differ much. As in the other two ex-periments, accuracy on masculine gender was higher than on feminine gender,accuracy on determiners was higher than on adjectives, and accuracy on canon-ical ending nouns was higher than on less canonical and exceptional endingnouns. When errors occur, both L2 learners and heritage speakers overextendthe default masculine form to the more specified feminine form. The patternsof errors found are consistent with McCarthy’s (2007) Morphological Under-specification Hypothesis.

Overall and Individual Results

The collective results of the three experiments can be summarized as follows.The two experimental groups—L2 learners and heritage speakers—made gen-der agreement errors, whereas the monolingual control group made very few.Because monolingual native speakers hardly make gender errors with mostcommon and frequently used nouns (regardless of whether they are exceptionsor not) in the generative L2 acquisition literature reviewed in this study, error

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rates above 10% in nonnative or bilingual speakers are taken as evidence of somesort of deficit or failure with gender assignment and agreement (Franceschina,2001, 2005). This failure can be at the level of lexical assignment or during thesyntactic computation of agreement among the noun, the determiner, and theadjective. Differences between the native speakers and the two experimentalgroups were clear in all tasks, with the L2 learners and heritage speakers com-bined making between 10% and 25% errors overall. Thus, our study confirmsthat Spanish gender agreement is affected and not entirely controlled in bothearly- and late-adult bilingual grammars.

In the context of ongoing debates on the nature of linguistic representa-tions in L2 acquisition as a function of age, the main aim of this study wasto compare whether the incomplete L2 grammars of late bilinguals are “moreincomplete,” so to speak, than the incomplete L1 grammars of early bilinguals,due to different ages of acquisition and linguistic experiences. In L2 acquisition,incomplete grammars might be due to the combined effects of L1 influence,age of acquisition, and variable input, whereas in heritage language grammars,incomplete acquisition might be due to impoverished input and L2 influence. IfL2 acquisition is subject to maturational effects, as the representational deficitview maintains, then L2 learners’ knowledge and command of Spanish agree-ment should be less accurate than that of heritage speakers, in both comprehen-sion and production. Full access accounts, by contrast, predict no differencesbetween L2 learners and heritage speakers of comparable proficiency levelsbut might predict differences between production and comprehension tasks asper the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. If L2 learners demonstrate lessaccuracy in oral production than in comprehension, then this could be dueto difficulty accessing and assembling gender morphology during production,rather than to a representational deficit problem at the level of abstract syntacticformal features.

To answer our first research question, in this section we look at the com-bined results of the three experiments. Even when the experimental groupsreceived overall similar scores in a written measure of proficiency, the overallresults of the three experiments showed statistical differences between the L2learners and the heritage speakers. Contrary to the two hypotheses, however,the L2 learners were more accurate than the heritage speakers in the two writtentasks (Experiments 1 and 2), but the performance of the heritage speakers wassuperior to that of the L2 learners in the Oral Picture Description Task (Exper-iment 3). If problems with gender agreement are representational (i.e., at thelevel of grammatical competence rather than performance), there should not bea task effect. To verify this prediction, and because all participants performed

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Table 9 Descriptive statistics for overall accuracy on the three experimental tasks bygroup

Written Gender Written Picture Oral PictureRecognition Task Interpretation Task Description Task

Groups M SD Range M SD Range M SD Range

L2 Learners 89.5 9.9 62–100 88.5 15.6 37–100 72.1 13.1 49.7–100Heritage 84.6 11.3 58.5–100 83.3 17.8 37–100 89.7 11.9 58–100

speakersNative 97.4 2.6 92–100 99.1 1.7 94–100 99.9 0.40 98–100

speakers

the three experiments, we ran an analysis comparing the overall results of thethree tasks, which are summarized in Table 9. Table 9 shows that the heritagespeakers’ errors ranged from roughly 11% in the oral task to more than 15%in the two written tasks, whereas the differences for the L2 learners were morestriking: more than 25% errors in the oral task and slightly above 10% errors inthe written tasks. A repeated measures ANOVA conducted on the overall scoresof the three tasks revealed main effects for task, F(2,153) = 3.331, p = .038,η2

p = .022, group, F(2,153) = 24.967, p < .0001, η2p = .255, and a Task ×

Group interaction, F(2,153) = 13.956, p < .0001, η2p = .250. For the heritage

speakers, the close to 5% difference between the results of the Oral PictureDescription Task and the Written Picture Identification Task, t(66) = −2.041,p = .045, d = −0.30, and between the results of the Oral Picture DescriptionTask and the Written Gender Recognition Task, t(66) = 2.003, p = .048, d =−0.28, proved marginally significant, whereas the more than 16% differencebetween the oral production and the two written comprehension tasks was sta-tistically more robust for the L2 learners: Written Picture Identification Taskversus Oral Picture Description Task, t(71) = 6.301, p < .0001, d = 1.07, andWritten Gender Recognition Task versus Oral Picture Description Task, t(71) =7.180, p < .0001, d = 1.32. For the native speakers, by contrast, there were nodifferences between the tasks.

Even though the groups of heritage speakers and L2 learners included par-ticipants ranging from low to advanced proficiency in Spanish, how many of theadvanced L2 learners and heritage speakers scored within the range of variationof native speakers? For this analysis, we counted the number of individuals ineach group who scored above the minimum score obtained by native speak-ers in each task, which was 91.87% in the Written Gender Recognition Task,94% in the Written Picture Identification Task, and 98% in the Oral Picture

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Table 10 Number and percentage of individuals in the L2 learners and heritage speakergroups who scored within the range of variation of the native speakers in each and alltasks

Written Gender Written Picture Oral PictureRecognition Interpretation Description

Task Task Task All tasks

Groups N Count % Count % Count % Count %

L2 learners 72 42 58.5 40 55.4 2 3 2 3Heritage 67 35 52 31 46 16 24 9 13

speakers

Description Task.8 Results for each task and for all the tasks combined areshown in Table 10. Individual results showed that only 2 of 72 L2 learners(less than 3%) performed within the range of variation of the native-speakergroup in the three tasks, whereas we found 9 heritage speakers of 67 (morethan 13%) who performed at the native-speaker level. The two L2 learners whoscored within the native-speaker range obtained scores of 48 and 49/50 in thewritten proficiency test, also within the range of variation of native speakers(45–50). Among the heritage speakers, 1 scored 31/50 (intermediate), whereasthe other 8 scored between 40 and 45/50 (advanced), below the range of thenative speakers on the written proficiency test. Clearly, even when L2 learnersand heritage speakers obtained overall similar scores in the written proficiencymeasure, we not only find more instances of overall nativelike performance inthe heritage speaker group, but we also find that the linguistic competence of theheritage speakers is slightly comparable and consistent across the three tasks(i.e., the statistical difference between the written and oral tasks and the effectsizes are very small for this group). The L2 learners, by contrast, show a widediscrepancy in their ability with the oral production and written interpretationtasks.

Our second research question concerned the types of errors made by the twoexperimental groups. Errors were observed in both comprehension and produc-tion, and the patterns of errors confirm the same trends found in previous studiesand predicted by different accounts of gender within generative grammar. Allbilinguals were more accurate on masculine, the default or unmarked form,than on feminine gender agreement, the marked form. As for agreement withinthe DP, accuracy on determiners was higher than on adjectives. Finally, whenword ending was examined, gender agreement with canonical ending nouns(−o masculine, −a feminine, both animate and inanimate) was more accurate

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than with noncanonical ending and exceptional ending nouns. The highest pro-portion of errors occurred with adjective agreement on noncanonical endingfeminine nouns.

Discussion

The combined results of the three experiments show that both L2 learners andheritage speakers make systematic gender agreement errors, but whereas errorsaffect L2 learners mostly in oral production, they affect heritage speakers inwritten comprehension.

The results do not support the deficit view of L2 acquisition as expressedby the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis. This is because heritage speakerswere also found to have problems with gender agreement and assignment de-spite exposure to Spanish since birth; there was an asymmetry between genderagreement in production and comprehension for the two groups; and patternsof errors were systematic rather than random for the two groups.

The finding that the L2 learners’ problems with gender agreement are morepronounced in production than in comprehension, however, is most compatiblewith the predictions of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. However,White et al. (2004), who also used a similar picture interpretation task (Ex-periment 1) and an oral task, did not find a task effect with the English- andFrench-speaking learners they tested. The results of the L2 learners in our studyare similar to White et al.’s results for the interpretation task, but they are verydifferent for the oral task, because the L2 learners in our study were highlyinaccurate, especially with feminine nouns. A difference between the oral taskwe used and the one White et al. used is the degree of difficulty. It is not clearwhat the target words in the White et al. were, as the oral task used appearssomewhat open ended (a picture game and a picture description). Except for thecommon and high-frequency nouns chico “boy,” barba “beard,” camisa “shirt,”camiseta “T-shirt,” and pantalones “pants,” the complete list of nouns elicitedis not described in detail. It is possible that most of the nouns elicited by Whiteet al. were canonical-ending nouns, which would explain why the L2 learnerswere so accurate with them. By contrast, the picture description task we used inExperiment 3 manipulated 50 nouns divided into canonical and noncanonicalendings and exceptional ending nouns (−a masculine and −o feminine). Thus,the difficulty of the stimuli might have caused the differential results. If this isthe case, then using only canonical ending nouns might overestimate L2 learn-ers’ knowledge of gender in production, and this is probably what happened inthe White et al. study.

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Even if the results of the L2 learners appear to be compatible with a fullaccess account of L2 acquisition, can we optimistically conclude that their lin-guistic knowledge of Spanish is fundamentally similar to that of native speakersand heritage speakers? Beacuse heritage speakers displayed better performancein production than in comprehension, it appears that the Missing Surface Inflec-tion Hypothesis does not apply to cases of incomplete L1 acquisition in heritagespeakers. How then can we theoretically capture the difference between incom-plete L2 versus incomplete L1 acquisition and accommodate the findings of thetwo populations in this study?

Other crucial differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers con-cern context, mode of acquisition, and literacy, which are, of course, related.L2 learners acquire an L2 late and typically in a classroom setting. Althoughthere is oral practice in classrooms, most of the input is written, and classroominstruction emphasizes knowledge about language or metalinguistic skills. Bycontrast, the heritage speakers tested in this study acquired Spanish early inchildhood primarily in a naturalistic setting (home), mostly through the oralmedium. Because they received formal schooling and education in English,they typically have less experience with Spanish literacy skills (reading, writ-ing, and metalinguistic knowledge) until they enter college.

Compatible with the representational deficit view within generative gram-mar are other cognitive and neurolinguistic approaches to SLA and bilingualism,which consider that grammatical representations differ with respect to kinds oflearning and storage (DeKeyser, 2003; N. Ellis, 2005; Paradis, 2004; Ullman,2001). This is reminiscent of Krashen’s (1982) famous acquisition/learning dis-tinction. Implicit knowledge is stored in procedural memory (where rules aretypically stored according to Ullman, 2001, and Pinker & Ullman, 2002) and isexecuted with automaticity and speed. Explicit knowledge is learned explicitly,with awareness of what is being learned and with conscious effort. It is storedin declarative memory and can be verbalized on demand. For Paradis, who alsoconsidered this distinction crucial for his neurolinguistic theory of bilingual-ism, there are two ways of speaking: using linguistic competence only, as thecase of young children and illiterates, or using metalinguistic knowledge only.In Paradis’s view, incipient L2 learners and individuals with genetic dysphasiause metalinguistic knowledge. Normal adults have the two systems available(Krashen).

How do these two types of learning develop in L1, L2, and bilingual lan-guage acquisition? Research suggests that implicit knowledge of language de-velops first in monolingual children during the critical period (Bialystok, 1994),whereas metalinguistic knowledge of language emerges between ages 3 and 5

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(Karmiloff-Smith, 1979) and fully develops when children go to school andlearn to read and write. This is explicitly stated in Birdsong (1989), who ar-gued: “Something happens to children between the ages of 4 and 6 that changesthe way they look at language and operate within and upon it. From a learn-ability perspective, whatever the change may be, it is not a necessary conditionfor acquiring the language, since the essentials of native speaker competenceare acquired before then. This change may not ever take place unless the read-ing skill is in place” (p. 45). In contrast to L1-acquiring children, adult L2learners are already literate when they start their L2 acquisition. Especially ina classroom setting, explicit knowledge of the L2 develops first, and it is un-clear to date whether it develops in tandem with implicit knowledge of the L2system as well or whether explicit knowledge becomes implicit, automatic orintegrated (Jiang, 2007). As for early bilingual speakers of heritage languages,who received minor or no schooling in the heritage language, they typicallyhave limited academic literacy in their L1, developed through reading, writing,and spelling.

If we accept that context and timing of acquisition might play a role inhow linguistic knowledge is acquired, stored, and integrated, the question iswhether a representational deficit view, or a critical period explanation, is stillconsistent with our findings. We suggest that this interpretation is possible if,and only if, the results of the oral task are taken as the most representativemeasure of implicit linguistic knowledge used in this study (cf. R. Ellis, 2005),although we are aware that this is a highly controversial suggestion in generativeL2 acquisition. Both DeKeyser (2003) and Paradis (2004) explicitly discussedthe critical period hypothesis for adult L2 acquisition and expressed that thehypothesis applies to implicit linguistic competence only; procedural memorydeclines somewhere in childhood, and there is loss of implicit mechanisms forlanguage learning. As a result of this loss, adult L2 learners are forced to relyon explicit learning or a different cognitive system to learn language, as Bley-Vroman (1989) stated in the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis. For DeKeyser(2000), this is exactly how the critical period ought to be understood.

Seeing the results of our study through this lens, we can interpret accu-racy scores on the oral task as being more representative of fast, implicit, andautomatically processed knowledge (typically acquired early in childhood),whereas accuracy scores of the written tasks could be taken to reflect abil-ity with metalinguistic, explicit knowledge (typically acquired later). Becausemetalinguistic knowledge of gender assignment and agreement can be used tocompensate for gaps in implicit competence (Paradis, 2004), this would explainwhy L2 learners appear to be better than the heritage speakers with gender in

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the written interpretation and recognition tasks when in fact they might not bebetter with implicit knowledge of gender in general after all. Although Whiteet al. (2004) defended the position that both naturalistic and classroom inputcontribute to underlying abstract knowledge of gender (p. 107), our conclusionis that both L2 learners and heritage speakers know something about grammat-ical gender in Spanish, but such knowledge might be stored, represented, anddeployed differently.9

It could also be argued that the patterns of results obtained in this studyare a function of the tasks used and the types of linguistic behavior they elicit,rather than a reflection of how grammatical knowledge of Spanish gender agree-ment is represented and stored in L2 learners and heritage speakers. In otherwords, the two written tasks used were more metalinguistic and required sub-jects to make a choice out of two or three possible answers, leaving some roomfor reflection and guessing. The oral task used in Experiment 3, on the otherhand, required a spontaneous and fast response. In terms of difficulty, the twowritten tasks tested mostly canonical ending words (inner and outer core inHarris’s 1991 description), whereas the oral task included exceptional endingnouns as well. In his study of metalinguistic judgments and linguistic compe-tence, Birdsong (1989) discussed several tasks used in L2 research and citedBialystok and Ryan’s (1985) model of metacognitive functions. This model, asFigure 10 shows, takes into account degree of control and analyzed knowledge.Plotting the tasks of our study in Bialystok and Ryan’s model, Figure 10 showsthat the two written tasks we used—the Written Picture Identification Task(Experiment 1) and the Written Gender Recognition Task (Experiment 2)—require high cognitive control and a high level of analyzed knowledge, whereasthe Oral Picture Description Task (Experiment 3) requires low control and alow level of analyzed knowledge. The written tasks favor L2 learners’ metalin-guistic abilities, whereas the oral task favors heritage speakers’ spontaneousskill with the language.

What would performance be on a task that requires moderate analyzedknowledge, such as, according to Birdsong (1989), a grammaticality judgmenttask (GJT)? Montrul, Foote and Perpinan’s (in press) study of wh-questionstested the same participants as this study and used a written GJT that includedungrammatical filler sentences with gender errors. They found no overall differ-ences between heritage speakers and L2 learners on acceptability of grammat-ical and ungrammatical sentences at intermediate and low proficiency levels.At the advanced level, the L2 learners (many of whom were Spanish languageinstructors) marginally outperformed the heritage speakers. Clearly, we mustkeep exploring this question by investigating knowledge of gender agreement

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Figure 10 Bialystok & Ryan’s (1985) model of linguistic and metacognitive functions.Adapted from Birdsong (1989).

and other grammatical properties with tasks that minimize participants’ directuse of explicit or prescriptive knowledge of gender, although this might be veryhard to control.

Assuming that the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge isvalid to explain the results of this study, two questions that arise are, first,whether heritage speakers can eventually catch up with metalinguistic knowl-edge of the heritage language that they did not get in school and, second, whetherL2 learners can eventually develop implicit and/or highly automatized gram-matical knowledge to be deployed during oral production and comprehension.The individual results of the speakers in this study seem to already providea positive answer to each of these questions because 3% of L2 learners and13% of heritage speakers performed at the native-speaker range of variation,but, again, the incidence for success in L2 learners is much lower than in theheritage speaker group. Similarly, a spoken word recognition study conductedby Guillelmon and Grosjean (2001) asked how early and late English-Frenchbilinguals reacted to gender marking when processing French. According tothe results, the early bilinguals showed clear facilitation and inhibition effects,whereas the late bilinguals were totally insensitive to gender marking. However,it appears that the early bilinguals were more proficient in French than the late

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bilinguals, according to self-reports, so these results must be taken with caution.Future research should continue to investigate knowledge of gender in early andlate bilinguals in timed spoken word recognition and comprehension as wellas in production experiments. Studies that combine behavioral measures withreaction times and neuroimaging techniques, for example, might prove idealto investigate the nature and outcome of grammatical competence in early andlate bilinguals.

To conclude, both the L2 learners and the heritage speakers tested in thisstudy have grammatical deficits with gender agreement, but the root of thedeficits might be different. Incomplete acquisition in heritage speakers is dueto variable and insufficient input, whereas incomplete acquisition in instructedL2 learners migh be due to both variable input and access to different languagelearning mechanisms. Different learning mechanisms could explain why theinability to use correct nominal inflection spontaneously in production, for ex-ample, applies to L2 learners but not so much to heritage speakers. Furthermore,even when both L2 learners and heritage speakers have incomplete knowledgeof the language, the incidence of native-speaker competence is higher in theheritage speaker than in the L2 learner group. The results of this study, togetherwith results of two other recent studies conducted with the same individualsreported here (Montrul, in press; Montrul et al., in press) confirm that heritagespeakers have more nativelike knowledge of core grammatical properties ofSpanish than L2 learners. With respect to potential implications for heritagelanguage instruction, we suggest that even when heritage speakers are overallfluent and proficient speakers of the language, they still have gaps in their lin-guistic knowledge. As many classes for heritage language learners already do,instruction and practice for these learners need to focus on the written language,because it is in their written comprehension and production that these linguisticdeficiencies are more apparent.

Revised version accepted 5 September 2007

Notes

1 Within generative grammar, L1 acquisition is typically described as fast andefficient because by the time children are 3 years of age they have accomplished agreat deal syntactically: They put words in the correct order, they use complexsentences, they know several abstract syntactic constraints of their language withouthaving received any type of instruction (Crain & Thornton, 1998; Guasti, 2002).For example, Guasti (p. 2) said “for children, acquiring a language is an effortlessachievement.” Additionally, O’Grady (1997, p. 4), working from a general nativism

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perspective wrote that the language acquisition system available to children “existssubconsciously and is acquired without deliberate effort at an early age.”

2 Not all adjectives show gender agreement either, depending on theirmorphophonological form. If we take just the example of colors, the colors negro/a“black,” blanco/a “white,” rojo/a “red,” and amarillo/a “yellow” can be inflected inthe feminine or masculine form, but those ending in “e” such as verde “green,”celeste “light blue,” or in a consonant such as azul “blue,” cannot be visiblyinflected for gender and remain invariant (El auto celeste/azul “the car lightblue/blue,” la luz verde/azul “the light green/blue”).

3 An exception to this claim is the case of feminine words that start with a stressed“a,” such as agua “water,” aguila “eagle,” ancla “anchor,” angel “angel.” Withthese nouns, the determiner surfaces as masculine, whereas the adjective isfeminine (e.g., el agua pura “the-masc water pure-fem”). This morphophonologicalrule is acquired later, probably around age 6, and even adult native speakers haveinconsistent judgments as to the gender of these nouns when asked to judge nounphrases containing this type of nouns together with different determiners,quantifiers and adjectives (J. I. Hualde, personal communication).

4 Unlike the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis, McCarthy (2007) made nospecific claims as to whether the representational deficit with gender features,which, for her, lie at the morphological not syntactic level, is due to age.

5 Most subjects participated in 18 short experiments, 3 of which are only reportedhere. All subjects were tested individually by the research assistants in two 90-minsessions completed on 2 different days. The order of the tasks completed in eachexperimental session varied for all participating subjects. On some occasions, somesubjects did not complete some of the tests. Therefore, the number of subjects inthe three experiments reported might vary slightly.

6 Number (singular, plural) was included so that more than two options wereavailable for the multiple- choice responses. Becausee number is not the focus ofthe study, masculine and feminine conditions were collapsed within each genderclass for the analysis of results. Therefore, the masculine and feminine conditionshad 16 sentences each.

7 All participants were instructed to describe each picture following the modelprovided. However, especially with oral production tasks, it is common forparticipating subjects to sometimes forget the instructions as they perform a task.Some of the research assistants did not interrupt the participants during their oralproduction to remind them that they had to use adjectives. After noticing thistendency in our preliminary analysis of the first few subjects tested, all researchassistants were instructed to remind the participants to use adjectives in theirdescriptions. Results of these participants were taken into account for the overallaccuracy analysis but not for the analysis by linguistic variables because manysubjects did not have data on the two levels of the domain of agreementvariable.

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8 In a previous version of this article we used performance above 90% in all tasks asnativelike, following the criterion used by many of the studies in the generativeparadigm cited in the review of literature section (Franceschina, 2001, 2005).According to this criterion, we identified 4 L2 learners and 28 heritage speakersscoring above 90% in all tasks. It is common to use 2 SDs below the mean of thenative-speaker group as criterion for nativelike ability, and we have used this samecriterion in previous work on near-native competence. However, because there wasvery little variability in the native-speaker group in this study, we chose nativespeakers’ minimum score in each task instead. No matter which criterion we use,the fact is that the incidence of nativelike competence is much higher in theheritage speaker than the L2 learner group.

9 McCarthy (2007) also tested knowledge of verbal inflection by English-speakingL2 learners of Spanish. She found that the learners performed at ceiling in thecomprehension task and made errors in the production task. Such high performanceby the L2 learners in the comprehension task did not allow her to confirm theMorphological Underspecification Hypothesis in the verbal domain. She wrote:“This problem could be rectified by testing participants at lower levels ofproficiency or perhaps participants who were naturalistic learners rather thanclassroom learners” (p. 173). Implicitly, McCarthy is suggesting that classroomlearners have different, probably more metalinguistic knowledge of the languagethan naturalistic learners.

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Appendix A

Target Nouns in the Written Picture Identification Task

Masculine nouns Feminine nouns

anillo “ring” maleta “suitcase”boleto “ticket” computadora “computer”sombrero “hat” cartera “purse”abrigo “coat” corbata “tie”sueter “sweater” camara “camera”reloj “watch” pelıcula “film”boli “pen” falda “skirt”maquillaje “make up” camiseta “T-shirt”cuadernos “notebooks” maletas “suitcases”panuelos “handkerchiefs” pilas “batteries”zapatos “shoes” fotos “pictures”vestidos “dresses” blusas “blouses”trajes “suits” gafas “eye glasses”calcetines “socks” camisas “shirts”moviles “cellular phones” chaquetas “jackets”pantalones “pants” llaves “keys”

Appendix B

Target Nouns in the Oral Picture Description Task (Experiment 3)

Masculine Feminine

−o animate −a animatecerdo “pig” jirafa “giraffe”gallo “rooster” mariposa “butterfly”gato “cat” oveja “sheep”perro “dog” rata “rat”toro “bull” vaca “cow”

−o inanimate −a inanimatebrazo “arm” copa “glass”libro “book” lampara “lamp”ojo “eye” mesa “table”telefono “telephone” silla “chair”vestido “dress” vela “candle”

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Masculine Feminine

−a −oartista “artist” foto “photograph”atleta “athlete” mano “hand”dentista “dentist” modelo “model”mapa “map” moto “motorcycle”planeta “planet” radio “radio”

−e −ecable “wire” carne “beef”coche “car” calle “street”peine “comb” leche “milk”puente “bridge” llave “key”guante “glove” nube “cloud”

Consonant Consonantreloj “clock” flor “flower”arbol “tree” luz “light”avion “airplane” nariz “nose”lapiz “pencil” nuez “walnut”televisor “TV set” sal “salt”

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