Subject position in heritage Spanish in the Netherlands and the US: a case for cross-linguistic influence / Brechje van Osch

Subject position in heritage Spanish in the Netherlands and the US: a case for cross-linguistic influence / Brechje van Osch, in colloque "Bilingualism vs. monolingualism: a new perspective on limitations to L2 acquisition" organisé par le laboratoire Octogone-Lordat (Université Toulouse 2) sous la responsabilité de Barbara Köpke (UT2J), Holger Hopp (Technische Universität Braunschweig), Tanja Kupisch (Universität Konstanz), Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 19-20 juin 2017.

Whereasheritage Spanish is a popular topic of investigation in the US, much less isknown about heritage Spanish in combination with languages other than English(but see Irizarri van Suchtelen, 2016, and references there). The present studyoffers a relevant addition to the field by comparing two groups of heritagespeakers of Spanish in different countries: one group in the US and another inthe Netherlands.
Thetopic of investigation is subject position with intransitive predicates. InSpanish, both preverbal and postverbal subjects are grammatical, butfelicitousness depends on several syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints(Domínguez, 2013; Roggia, 2011). Most US based studies report that heritagespeakers tend to overgeneralize preverbal subjects compared to monolingualbaseline groups (e.g. Montrul, 2005; Zapata et al., 2005). This is notsurprising given that in English postverbal subjects are ungrammatical, exceptfor a few restricted contexts such as locative inversion (example 1). But whilecross-linguistic influence from English is a plausible explanation, one cannotrule out simplification towards the default order in Spanish as an (additional)factor. It is therefore interesting to look at another dominant language.
Dutchis a V2 second language that allows different types of constituents in thefirst position as long as the finite verb fills the second position. If thesubject is in first position, it precedes the finite verb (example 2). If adifferent constituent, such as an adverb or an object, is in first position,the subject follows the finite verb (example 3). Because Dutch allows VSorders, Dutch heritage speakers of Spanish may be expected to overgeneralizepreverbal subjects to a lesser extent than their US counterparts.
Acontextualized scalar acceptability judgment task was administered to 22heritage speakers of Spanish with Dutch as their dominant language and 18monolingual Spanish speakers. An example of a task item is shown in example 4.The results showed that the Dutch heritage speakers of Spanish overgeneralizedpostverbal, not preverbal subjects (figure 1). An adapted version of the task(the same design but different and slightly more items) was carried out with 24Spanish heritage speakers in Newark, New Jersey, with similar proficiency(based on a lexical decision task and self-ratings). These speakers did notovergeneralize either order (figure 2). Preliminary data from elicitedproduction seem to confirm these findings. The different preference patternsbetween the two groups suggest differential effects of the dominant languages,providing support for the role of cross-linguistic influence.