Agree to Disagree Accounting for Grammatical Gender “Errors” Among Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Abstract

Heritage speakers’ deviations from monolingual gender agreement patterns have been interpreted as evidence of incomplete acquisition or language attrition among heritage speakers (Anderson, 1999; Montrul et al., 2008; Polinsky, 2008), yet research from the last decade points to lexical assignment as the primary culprit of nontarget gender production, rather than problems with the linguistic system itself. For that reason, this study uses elicited production to examine how heritage speakers assign grammatical gender to nonce (i.e., invented) nouns, manipulating syntactic and morphological gender cues in the input. Results suggest that heritage speakers rely heavily on noun morphology with canonical gender endings (-o/-
a); in neutral morphological conditions (-e) they show a tendency to overgeneralize the unmarked (i.e., masculine) forms. Additionally, age of English acquisition is found to influence the gender assignment strategies employed. The implications
for these findings on modeling heritage speaker grammars are considered.