The acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive by child heritage speakers of Spanish

This study investigates the acquisition of obligatory and variable subjunctive across modality type among child heritage speakers of Spanish. Specifically, it focuses on the production of obligatory and variable subjunctive in deontic, epistemic, and epistemological predicates, and the role of extralinguistic factors such as chronological age, proficiency and language exposure/use in the use of the subjunctive.

The subjunctive mood, known for its grammatical complexities, has been extensively studied among heritage speakers. Previous research has documented difficulties in the mastery of the subjunctive mood with Spanish heritage speakers showing lower rates of subjunctive use in variable contexts, but higher rates in obligatory contexts (Montrul, 2007, 2009; Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Van Osch & Sleeman, 2018). These findings have been taken as evidence of interface vulnerability effects in the acquisition of mood. Nonetheless, recent studies by Lustres et al. (2020) and Perez-Cortes (2021) have suggested that differences between obligatory and variable subjunctive might be mitigated if the modality of the predicates is controlled. This study builds upon existing literature that emphasize the role of modality in language acquisition (Blake, 1983; Merino, 1983; Silva-Corvalán, 1994) and employs a comparative analysis to examine whether child heritage speakers of Spanish exhibit similar patterns of subjunctive use as their monolingual peers and parents. The study contributes to heritage language research by incorporating child participants, filling a significant gap in existing literature predominantly focused on adult heritage speakers.

Thirty child heritage speakers of Spanish (age range: 6;5 - 12;8, M= 9;11, SD=1.91), thirty monolingual children from Mexico (age range: 6;0 - 12;2, M= 9;46, SD=2.17), fifteen immigrant parents (age range: 29 - 47, M= 39;27, SD=6.56) and fifteen monolingual parents (age range: 25 - 45, M= 34;67, SD=6.87) completed an elicited production task. The results revealed significant differences in subjunctive use between groups. The heritage children were outperformed by the monolingual children and parents as they exhibited lower subjunctive use. However, there was variability in their production. The results showed that the heritage children employed the subjunctive more frequently in deontic contexts than in epistemic and epistemological contexts. Similarly, monolingual children showed high subjunctive usage in deontic and epistemic contexts but lower usage in epistemological contexts. No differences were observed between obligatory and variable contexts within the same modality. These findings challenge previous assertions regarding the influence of selection type and underscore the significance of modality in research of mood. Despite variability within participants, the results indicated that the subjunctive production was influenced by the participants’ age and proficiency levels. High proficiency along with increased age led to a higher proportion of subjunctive. These findings provide support to the Bilingual Alignment approach and the activation approach which relates differences in heritage grammars to the degree of activation of each language on the mind.