Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: español como lengua de herencia

Resumen:

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This eye tracking study examined the role of lexical frequency in the processing of non-local verbal number agreement by heritage speakers of Spanish. Few prior studies of heritage bilingualism have investigated the role of word frequency in the comprehension or production of morphosyntax, and none have employed a real-time measure of sentence processing, despite the well-known sensitivity of such methods to word frequency and the proposal of some scholars that such online methodologies could be particularly useful in research on heritage speakers. Fifty heritage speakers of Spanish read stimulus sentences containing non-local verbal number agreement that depended on a verb that was either high or low frequency,...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: adquisición de segundas lenguas

Resumen:

Extended oral production has seldom been used to explore adjectival and verbal agreement in L2 Spanish. This study examines oral narrations to compare the agreement behavior, speech rates, and patterns of errors of highly proficient Spanish heritage and L2 learners (early and late bilinguals, respectively), whose L1 is English, with those of native controls. Although both bilingual groups displayed high agreement accuracy scores, only the early bilinguals performed at or close to ceiling. In addition, the L2 learners spoke significantly more slowly than the heritage and native speakers, who displayed similar speech rates. Explanations accounting for the differences in speech rates and agreement accuracy include age of acquisition of Spanish, syntactic distance between a noun and its adjective, and task effects. All of these factors...

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