multilingualism

Introduction / Background

This study aims to examine heritage speakers’ attrition through the lens of dominant language transfer by probing this question with two groups of HSs: English-dominant Spanish HSs and French-dominant Spanish HSs. To do so, we focus on the syntactic structures of prepositional relative clauses. Relative clauses (“RCs”) are clauses used to modify a noun (e.g., In The dress that Mary wore was very old, the clause that Mary wore is an RC that modifies the noun phrase the dress.).

Prepositional relative clauses, which are notable because they contain a prepositional object, have two possible realizations in a sentence. The first is preposition-stranding (“P-stranding”), which occurs when a preposition is “stranded” at the end of a relative clause (e.g., The track which they train on _ is slippery and dangerous). The second, pied-piping, occurs when the preposition and the wh-element move together to the front of the clause to form a relative clause (e.g., The track on which they train _ is slippery and dangerous). All three languages explored in this study—Spanish, French, and English—accept pied-piping constructions. Our central motivation behind choosing these three languages, however, stems from the fact that English accepts P-stranding, but it is ungrammatical in both Spanish and French. We will return to this cross-language split of grammaticality with P-stranding shortly.

Several previous studies on this topic have inspired our investigation and experimental design. Kim (2007) found that Korean HSs in the U.S. exhibited more attrition of a specific syntactic construction than their counterparts in China. Although this had to do with a different construction than P-stranding, the findings demonstrate language transfer in action, specifically because Korean and Chinese share the same grammatical setting with respect to the construction being tested, whereas English holds a different setting from the other two. This study has been the largest source of motivation for us to investigate dominant language transfer for other types of syntactic constructions.

Further research on P-stranding and Spanish heritage speakers inspired our experiment design, notably Depiante and Thompson (2013) and Pascual y Cabo and Soler (2015). Depiante and Thompson (2013) conducted acceptability judgement tasks with heritage Spanish-English bilinguals, asking their participants to judge pied-piping and P-stranding in various constructions, including relative clauses. They determined that Spanish HSs generally accepted P-stranding more than their Spanish-dominant counterparts. A follow-up study by Pascual y Cabo and Soler (2015) replicated the experiment and further found that the timing of English acquisition also had a notable effect on the rate at which the speakers accepted P-stranding. Both of these studies relied on receptive judgement tasks in which participants read sentences and evaluated their grammatical acceptability. Our study seeks to contribute to this conversation by combining oral production tasks alongside receptive tasks.

The other gap in research that we hope to fill has to do with testing the two different groups of heritage speakers that we are studying, as previously mentioned. Our research question is as follows: is the apparent attrition of Spanish heritage speakers’ grammar (i.e., the acceptance of preposition-stranding) due to a general loss of input or to transfer from the grammar of the dominant language? We are able to investigate this question largely because the three languages we are exploring have the same pattern as the three languages in the Kim study: P-stranding is grammatical in English but ungrammatical in Spanish and French. Therefore, if we find no difference between our English-dominant and French-dominant speakers, we would not be able to attribute any potential attrition to transfer from the dominant language. However, if we find that our English-dominant HSs accept and produce P-stranding at a higher rate than the French-dominant HSs—which is what we hypothesize for this study—we can make the claim that this is due to the fact that English accepts P-stranding and French does not, and therefore that attrition is due to dominant language transfer in the case of prepositional RCs.

Methods

We recruited six participants total; five Spanish-English bilinguals from the U.S., and one Spanish-French bilingual from France. All of the speakers were heritage speakers of Spanish, with ages ranging between 19-23 years old. After recruitment, participants completed our experiment in several stages. First, they completed the production task over Zoom, during which they were shown a presentation with clipart images and accompanying sentences, some of which were test sentences and some of which were fillers. Each test sentence contained a prepositional object, and participants were prompted to rephrase that sentence with a relative clause so that we could see where they placed the preposition. An example of one of these slides is shown in Figure 1 below.

After the production task, participants completed a “pre-survey” called the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) (https://sites.la.utexas.edu/bilingual/), a tool that linguistics researchers use to determine the language exposure and dominance of bilingual speakers. The BLP contains 19 main questions, each with their own sub-questions, which probe participants’ language exposure, linguistic history, daily use, confidence in fluency, and linguistic identity. All of this data is then used to automatically generate a dominance score, which determines which of the two languages the participant is dominant in. We used the dominance score and our participants’ self-reported ages of exposure in order to ensure that all participants were heritage speakers.

After the BLP, participants completed a main survey (the receptive task) in which they ranked sentences with relative clauses with prepositions, in addition to filler sentences, on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how natural or unnatural they sounded according to their intuitions. Our test conditions were evenly divided between pied-piping and P-stranding sentences. An example of one of our test sentences is shown below in Figure 2.

Results

We found that for both the elicitation and receptive tasks, the Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. produced or accepted P-stranding at a higher average rate than the participant from France. It is important to note that we ended up having four (4) Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. and one (1) from France. Initially, we had five (5) participants from the U.S., but one of them rated the aforementioned “good” (i.e., grammatically correct) control sentences in the acceptability judgment task too low; as such, we disregarded their data.

Figure 3 below presents the production task results. The U.S.-based Spanish heritage participants produced P-stranding constructions 50% of the time, compared to 0% of the time for the French participant. For example, each participant was given the prompt: “Los meseros trabajaban con una cocinera famosa. Esta es la cocinera famosa…” (‘The waiters worked with a famous cook. This is the famous cook…’) and asked to complete the sentence. Two out of four (50%) of the U.S. participants responded with “…que los meseros trabajaban con” (‘…whom the waiters worked with’), stranding the preposition “con” at the end of the phrase. In contrast, the French participant responded “…con que los meseros trabajaban” (‘…with whom the waiters worked’). Given that P-stranding is not grammatical in French or Spanish, these results are in line with our hypothesis, which predicts that the English-Spanish bilinguals would produce more P-stranding than their French-Spanish counterparts due to transfer from English grammar.

Figure 4 below presents the acceptability task results. As explained above, the participants were given a mix of P-stranding, pied piping, and grammatical and ungrammatical filler sentences in Spanish, and asked to rate their grammatical acceptability on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the most acceptable). The U.S.-based Spanish heritage participants rated P-stranding constructions to be an average of 3.33, compared to 1.67 for the French participant. For example, when given the sentence “La serie que hablan de tiene críticas muy buenas” (‘The show which they talked about has really good reviews’), the Spanish-English bilingual speakers gave it an average acceptability rating of 4 compared to 2 for the Spanish-French bilingual speaker. These results align with our hypothesis, which predicts that the Spanish-English bilingual speakers would accept P-stranding more than the Spanish-French bilingual speaker due to transfer from English grammar.

Discussion 

Our data from both the elicitation and acceptability judgement tasks provides evidence in favor of our hypothesis that attrition experienced by Spanish heritage speakers with respect to the production and judgement of prepositional relative clauses is due to grammar transfer from their dominant language. It is important to note that due to our small sample size, these results are just numerical comparisons of averages; we cannot assert statistical significance.

The asymmetry between our speaker groups (four (4) from the U.S. and only one (1) from France) is another significant limitation for this experiment. It was difficult to recruit Spanish heritage speakers from France given that we are based in the U.S. and considering the time constraints on our experiment. For example, one of our U.S.-based participants never produced P-stranding constructions in her elicitation task. If she had been our only participant from the U.S., our results would have shown no attrition in the production task for either speaker group. However, we are attributing this to her dominance score from the Bilingual Language Profile (see “Methods”), because she was the only participant whose score was slightly dominant in Spanish. The other three (3) Spanish-English bilingual speakers were dominant in English, and the Spanish-French bilingual speaker was dominant in French. Our hypothesis allows for these results because it attributes attrition to grammar transfer from one’s dominant language; therefore, a heritage speaker dominant in Spanish may not exhibit attrition to the same degree as one dominant in the majority language of their society.

Another potential limitation could be the fact that our French participant had been learning Spanish formally in school for most of his life, while none of the U.S.-based participants reported taking Spanish for more than a couple of years. Foreign language educator Dr. Kathleen Stein-Smith highlights the discrepancies in second-language education between the U.S. and European countries in her 2013 Ted Talk, “The U.S. foreign language deficit” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CZ7zu5Aeu0). She argues that educational institutions, businesses, and government-funded programs can help to promote foreign-language teaching at the societal level. While our French participant was a heritage speaker of Spanish (and therefore not learning Spanish as a “second” language), the fact that France has such a comparatively robust Spanish language curriculum was unavoidable and may have skewed our results. If a speaker is explicitly taught prescriptive grammatical rules—for example, not to strand prepositions—they are less likely to violate these rules than speakers with no formal education in a language they only acquired in the home.

Conclusion

This experiment allowed us to explore the source of grammatical attrition in Spanish heritage speakers in terms of producing and accepting prepositional relative clauses. We conducted an elicitation task and an acceptability judgement task for five (5) participants: four (4) Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. and one (1) from France. We found that on average, the participants from the U.S. produced and accepted P-stranding constructions more than the participant from France. Given that English allows P-stranding and French and Spanish do not, these results provide evidence in favour of our hypothesis that grammatical attrition in heritage speakers is caused by transfer from the grammar of speakers’ dominant languages. In other words, our study suggests that the participants from the U.S. are allowing and producing P-stranding in Spanish because they are dominant in English, which allows P-stranding. These findings shed light on how and why heritage speakers experience grammatical attrition, and have pedagogical implications for reinforcing heritage speakers’ language maintenance in the classroom. Bilingual education advocate Aminah Ghanem sheds light on the importance of reforming the U.S. language education system in order to promote multilingualism in her 2019 Ted Talk, “Reforming Our Bilingual Education System” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvCUk9qJQmE). She highlights the positive effects of multilingualism in terms of celebrating diverse cultures, preventing language discrimination, and the marginalisation of heritage speakers. We hope that our study will contribute to this conversation and promote future research and educational policy decisions as they affect heritage bilinguals.