UC Irvine

Heritage bilingualism is the most common form of bilingualism, yet it remains the most understudied. The existing literature on heritage languages has mainly employed offline measures, but these measures might not accurately reflect heritage language knowledge. This dissertation employs online methods to examine Spanish heritage speaker’s knowledge of complex structures that are traditionally complex (i.e., clitic pronouns) or complex innovations (i.e., the use of –e as a gender-inclusive morpheme). Study 1 examined gender and number agreement in clitic pronouns by means of an acceptability judgment task with EEG recording. At the group level, both the behavioral and electrophysiological data showed heritage speakers processed gender and number together. Such a finding supports the representational economy claim (Scontras et al., 2018), in which heritage speakers shrink their feature inventory and prune their structure so that it includes fewer nodes. The bundling of number and gender is possible because these feature categories are close to each other nominally. Study 2 examined how Spanish heritage speakers comprehended (Experiment 1) and produced (Experiment 2) gender-inclusive –e across the animacy hierarchy. Experiment 1 employed a self-paced reading task with sentences manipulating nouns for gender (masculine vs inclusive) and animacy (humans, animals, and objects). Inclusive nouns resulted in longer RTs than masculine nouns, an effect that was smallest for human nouns (e.g., les latines). Higher Spanish dominance facilitated the processing of nouns with the masculine generic, while better inhibitory control reduced RTs across all conditions. Experiment 2 employed three narrative tasks where heritage speakers had to tell a story regarding a day with their families and an event from their university’s Latine Resource Center. The third oral narrative consisted of retelling a story with seeded instances of gender-inclusive –e. Although the masculine –o was the preferred choice, the few instances where –e appeared only referred to humans. This suggests that, despite limited exposure, Spanish heritage speakers can integrate –e as a gender-inclusive morpheme that encodes human referents. Taken together, the results suggest heritage grammars are flexible and open to restructuring traditional features, an openness that also seems to aid in the comprehension and production of innovative forms.