How native are heritage speakers?

Silvina MontrulUniversity of Illinois at Urbana

Champaign

Heritage Language Summer InstituteUniversity of California, Los AngelesJune 18-22, 2012

Who is a native speaker?

• We all have an intuitive notion of what a native speaker is or should be (Sharwood-Smith 2011)

• Precise definitions are elusive (Davis 2003)

Stability vs. constrained variability

• Abstract linguistic knowledge (Chomsky)• Sociolinguistic variation (Labov)• Psycholinguistic variation (working

memory, executive control, aptitude, other individual variables)

Knowledge of language

Birth 4 yrs 12 yrs 18 yrs 40s

Knowledge of language

complete, stable?

FULLY FLUENTNATIVE SPEAKER

DEVELOPINGNATIVE SPEAKER

What develops?

• A phonological system• A lexicon• A set of grammatical rules and principles• Morphological expressions of forms and

meanings• Sentence structure (syntax)• communicative competence• Sociolinguistic competence

Examples of complete, fluent knowledge of language

Mature educated native speakers• Pronounce the sounds of their language well • Do not make morphological errors of omission or commission.

They are more than 90% accurate on the use of morphology in obligatory contexts.

• Know how to conjugate their verbs and make agreement in phrases

• Know many words in their language• Speak and write in grammatical sentences.• Understand different meanings of words and phrases• Know how to use language in different sociolinguistic contexts• Have pragmatic competence• Show consistent ceiling performance in tasks of grammatical

ability regardless of modality of task

Key variables that define and affect the developing native speaker

• Exposure to the language from birth• Use of the language at home• Schooling in the language• Socialization beyond the home in the language• Consistent exposure and language use in a variety of

contexts and communicative situations until about early adulthood

• Abnormal language development (SLI, down syndrome, autism, etc.)

Types of Native Speakers

Monolingual native speakers

Bilingual native speakers

Monolingual native speakers vary in

SES: low, mid, high SESLiteracy: literate, semiliterate, illiteratePathology: healthy vs. language impairedOther

How these variables affect linguistic competence is a matter of debate (see Dabrowska, 2012 and commentaries)

Bilingual native speakers vary in

All dimensions of monolingual speakers as well as in

• age of acquisition of the 2 languagessimultaneous bilingualssequential bilinguals

• degree of use of the language/sfluent vs. non-fluent

Ultimate attainment in monolingual native speakers

Birth 4 yrs 12 yrs 18 yrs 40s

Knowledge of language

complete, stable?

FULLY FLUENTNATIVE SPEAKER

DEVELOPINGNATIVE SPEAKER

beginning middle end

What is ultimate attainment?

The end state of the acquisition/language development process.

Is ultimate attainment always “native” level in bilingual native speakers?

NO• It can be fully native, as in monolingual native

speakers• It can be near-native, as in some L2 learners• It can be non-native, as in most L2 learners

Typology of Bilingual Native Speakers

• The fully fluent native speaker • The interrupted native speaker (heritage

speakers, international adoptee)• The attrited native speaker• The bilingual aphasic native speaker• Other?

“Native” ability

• Can also be dissociated in bilinguals• E.g., native or near-native in phonology and

non-native in morphosyntax (heritage speakers in Au et al. 2002)

• Or native/near native in morphosyntax and non-native in phonology (near-natives in White & Genesee 1996)

• Very few L2 speakers are “native” on all linguistic dimensions (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam 2009)

Purpose of this presentation

To show that despite exhibiting high degree of variability in degree of ultimate attainment like L2 learners, heritage speakers show a much higher incidence of native ability in morphosyntactic and lexical aspects of language that are extremely hard for L2 learners to master at native levels, even after significant amounts of input.

Heritage speakers and L2 learners

If we control for proficiency, does early language experience bring advantages to Spanish heritage speakers in their knowledge of early acquired aspects of morphosyntax when compared to late L2 learners of Spanish?

Advantage = more native-like performance

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Phonology (Au et al. 2002)

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Morphosyntax (Au et al. 2002)

Gender Agreement

• Mastered by monolingual Spanish-speaking children error free (100% accuracy) by age 3 (Montrul 2004) in oral production.

• Yet, full mastery of gender agreement in production is highly unlikely in L2 acquisition, even in so called near natives, with the highest amount of exposure in the language for several years and proficiency scores on global measures that fall within the range of variation of native speakers.

Examples

Franceschina (2001): Case study of Martin (British guy who had been living in Argentina for more than 30 years)

Almost 10% of gender agreement errors in production, especially with adjectives, articles and demonstratives.

Grüter, Lew-Williams & Fernald 2012: 19 near native speakers of Spanish exhibited 20% errors in an oral production task (17.2% assignment, 2.8% agreement)

Near native ability?• Studies that have found that non-native speakers

do not differ from native speakers have used tasks focusing exclusively on regular or canonical ending nouns: ending in –a if feminine and in –o if masculine (e.g., White et al. 2004).

• Several studies have shown that gender assignment and agreement with non-canonical or non-transparent nouns take longer to learn and to process (Bates et al.1995, 1996; Taraban & Kempe 1999, Taraban & Roark 1996).

Spanish Masculine Nouns

canonical

-o

non-canonical-e

non-canonical-cons

non-canonical-a

libro ‘book’

puente‘bridge’

lápiz‘pencil’

problema‘problem’

ojo ‘eye’

coche‘car’

mantel‘tablecloth’

mapa‘map’

suelo ‘floor ’

cable‘wire’

reloj‘clock’

planeta‘planet’

Spanish Feminine Nounscanonical

-a

non-canonical-e

non-canonical-cons

non-canonical-o

casa‘house’

leche‘milk’

nariz‘nose’

mano‘hand’

mesa‘table’

fuente‘fountain’

piel‘skin’

foto‘picture’

manzana‘apple’

llave‘key’

canción‘song’

moto‘motorcycle’

Montrul, Foote & Perpiñán (2008)

• 140 Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers ranging from low to advanced levels of proficiency.

• Both L2 learners and heritage speakers made gender errors, especially with non-canonical ending nouns.

• Advantages for heritage speakers on gender agreement depending on task.

• L2 learners performed better than heritage speakers in highly metalinguistic written tasks.

• Heritage speakers performed more accurately than L2 learners in oral production tasks.

Task Effects

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native speakers heritage speakers L2 learners

Written PIT

Written RT

Oral PDT

Revisiting knowledge of gender agreement (Montrul, Davidson de la Fuente and Foote)

Control for modality and avoid use of written language (literacy effect).

Investigate both regular and irregular nouns.4 aural/oral experiments that vary on the

implicit/explicit dimension 1. Timed grammaticality judgment task (GJT)2. Timed aural gender monitoring task (GMT)3. Timed oral word repetition task (WRT) 4. Elicited production task (EPT)

Participants• 24 Spanish native speakers (control group)• 29 Spanish heritage speakers (acquired

Spanish at birth and English before age 6)• 37 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish

(acquired Spanish after age 12)Heritage speakers and L2 learners ranged from

intermediate to advanced based on a written proficiency test.

Picture-Naming Task

Rationale: proficiency measure based on oral production

Stimuli:48 inanimate object nouns– frequency of 3 or higher in Spanish (Alameda &

Cuetos, 1995)– 24 canonical endings: 12 masculine -o, 12 feminine –a– 24 non-canonical endings: 6 masculine -cons, 6

feminine -cons, 6 masculine -e, 6 feminine -e

Picture-Naming Tasks• Participants completed the task both in Spanish and

in English (only HS and L2ers); native speakers only in Spanish.

• They were asked to view a series of black and white images and to name them as quickly as possible after hearing the audio prompt “diga” / “say” (recorded by a female Spanish native speaker)

• Items in both tasks were presented in random order• Naming accuracy and reaction times (after the onset

of the prompt) were measured

Picture-Naming TasksImage samples

Libro “book”

Sobre “envelope”

Corazón “heart”

Casa “house”

Llave “key”

Flor “flower”

Picture-Naming Tasks: ResultsEnglish

Picture-Naming Tasks: ResultsSpanish

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Word-Recognition Experiments

1. Timed grammaticality judgment task (GJT)2. Timed aural gender monitoring task (GMT)3. Timed word repetition task (WRT)

(Bates et al. 1995, 1996, Guillelmon & Grosjean 2001)

Experimental Design• For all three tasks, 300 determiner-noun-

adjective phrases (half target, half fillers) were constructed with 150 nouns, 3 determiners (masculine el, feminine la, neutral su) and 7 adjectives.

• All nouns were inanimate (half feminine, half masculine) with canonical and non-canonical endings, controlled for syllable length, stress, and frequency.

• All tasks used the same stimuli but with different distribution of fillers and targets in 3 conditions.

Conditions used in the three tasks

Conditions Gender Noun endingcanonical Non-canonical

grammatical feminine la gran casa la gran calle

masculine el peor texto el peor viaje

ungrammatical feminine *el gran casa *el gran calle

masculine *la peor texto *la peor viaje

neutral (control)* feminine su gran casa su gran calle

masculine su peor texto su peor viaje

NOTE: only the GMT and the WRT had a neutral condition, the GJT did not.

Procedures• The GMT required participants to listen to the noun

phrases and push one of two buttons on the keyboard (one for feminine, one for masculine), depending on the gender of the noun. (VERY EXPLICIT FOCUS ON GENDER)

• In the GJT, participants listened to the noun phrases and pushed one of two buttons to indicate whether the phrase was grammatical or ungrammatical. (INDIRECT ATTENTION TO GENDER)

• In the WRT, participants heard the noun phrases and were asked to repeat the last word in each phrase as quickly and accurately as possible. (NO ATTENTION TO GENDER)

Predictions

Task Type of response

Degree of explicitness

Advantages for HS over L2 learners?

GMT Decide whether a noun is feminine or masculine

very explicit focus on gender

no

GJT Decide whether a noun phrase is grammatical or ungrammatical

Explicit, but indirect focus on gender

no

WRT Repeat the last word in the phrase

implicit yes

Gender Monitoring Task: Accuracy

Grammaticality effect for all three groupsNative speakers > [heritage speakers = L2 learners]

Canonicity effect for L2 learners and HS.

Summary Effects GMT(difference % between ungrammatical and grammatical sentences)

Gender Monitoring Task RTs

Grammaticality effect for all three groupsNative speakers > [heritage speakers = L2 learners]

Canonicity effect.

Summary Speed Effects GMT(grammatical - ungrammatical RTs)

Grammaticality Judgment Task Accuracy

Grammaticality effect for all three groups.Native speakers > [heritage speakers = L2 learners]

Summary Accuracy Effects GJT

Grammaticality Judgment Task RTsGrammaticality effect for all three groupsNative speakers > [heritage speakers = L2 learners]

Summary Speed Effect GJT

Word Repetition Task--RTNo grammaticality effect for L2 learners.[native speakers = heritage speakers] >L2 learners

Summary Speed Effect WRT

Summary• Canonical and noncanonical nouns are processed differently.

Noun ending did not affect the native speakers to the same extent as the two experimental groups.

• HS and L2 learners were slower and less accurate on non-canonical ending nouns than on canonical ending nouns.

• The results of the GJT and the GMT revealed significant grammaticality effects for all groups. – They use gender cues on determiners in noun recognition.

• In the WRT, the NS and the HS showed a grammaticality effect, while the L2 learners did not. – L2 learners may not have the same type of implicit knowledge of

gender tested by this type of task.

Task effectTask Response Degree of explicitness

GMT Masculine/feminine Very explicit

GJT Grammatical/ungrammatical explicit

WRT repeat implicit

Favors heritage speakersHelps L2 learners

Conclusion

• These results confirm that HS have an advantage (i.e., show native-like patterns) over L2 learners in tasks tapping implicit knowledge. – Although this advantage could be due to age of

onset of bilingualism (early vs. late) (Guillelmon & Grosjean 2001), it may also be related to context of acquisition (naturalistic vs. instructed) and experience with oral production.

The Role of Experience

• Elicited Oral Production Task (untimed)• Elicitation of simplex and diminutive nouns with

gender agreement. elefante elefantito

simplex diminutive

Why diminutives?

• Hallmark of Child Directed Speech in early language development

• Highly productive morphological mechanism• Appear to facilitate the acquisition of

declensional noun endings in many languages (Savickienė & Dressler 2007): Lithuanian, Russian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Austrian German, Hungarian, Finnish, Hebrew

Diminutives in Child Language

• They are acquired early due both to their frequency in the input (in Child Directed Speech) and their morphological characteristics in many languages.

• In Spanish, they are acquired/used productively between the ages of 1;9 and 1;10 (Marrero, Aguirre and Albalá, 2007)

Spanish

• Aguirre, Marrero & Albalá (2007) claim that the frequency of usage of diminutives is not very high in Standard Spanish.

• Yet, Spanish-acquiring children use 13 times more diminutives than Spanish-speaking adults, and adults addressing children use them as much, if not more than the children themselves (Marrero, Albalá & Moreno, 2002: 155).

• In Spanish, most diminutives appear with nouns (but also with adjectives and adverbs).

Regularizing Gender Suffixes with Diminutives

-ito , -ita (among other dialectal variants)

Canonical ending nouns Non-canonical ending nouns

simplex diminutive simplex diminutive

Feminine la casa la casita la nariz la naricita

Masculine el auto el autito el coche el cochecito

Diminutives and gender• Seva et al. (2007)

Experimental study of 2 and 3 year old Russian and Serbo-Croatian children

• children were given simplex and diminutive forms of nouns and were asked to produce noun phrases with adjectives showing gender

• the toddlers were more accurate at gender agreement with diminutive nouns than with simplex forms. -> DIMINUTIVE ADVANTAGE

Research Question

Does the diminutive advantage carry over into adulthood?

Hypotheses• Heritage speakers should know more (about)

diminutives (i.e. their form and how to use them) than L2 learners.

Hypotheses• Heritage speakers should be more accurate

at producing gender agreement in general and with noncanonical nouns in particular than L2 learners of Spanish.– Diminutives help regularize noncanonical nouns– Heritage speakers were exposed to child directed

speech in Spanish; adult L2 learners were exposed to more “adult” input in Spanish, which contains very few diminutives.

Elicited Oral Production Task

• Stimuli came from the noun images used in the picture-naming tasks

• Subjects were now asked to produce utterances containing a determiner, a noun and a color adjective

• 8 color adjectives used: 4 explicit (rojo/a), 4 non-explicit (azul)

• Target nouns were randomly assigned an explicit color adjective, distracters were randomly assigned a non-explicit color adjective

Design and Procedure• Participants saw a total of 96 images (both

simplex and diminutive forms were requested)• Order of presentation was randomized and held

constant across participants• Participants’ responses were monitored by a

researcher with a check-list• Check-lists and audio recordings were analyzed

by at least two different raters

Elicited Oral Production TaskStimulus Samples

un pan grisun pancito gris

“a gray bread(dim.)”

una cruz negrauna crucecita negra

“a black cross(dim.)”

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Gender agreement in oral production

Results: Canonicity by Group

Gender by domain of agreement

Canonical Nouns in simplex and diminutive forms

Non-canonical nouns in simplex and diminutive forms

Summary– Native speakers are at ceiling in everything: no

effect for diminutive, gender or canonicity.– Both HS and L2ers perform almost at ceiling

with canonical-ending Ns regardless of whether they are in the simplex or in the diminutive form

–With non-canonical Ns, HS show a clear quantitative advantage over L2ers.

– No Diminutive Advantage for heritage speakers.

Error Analysis by subjects

Errors with diminutives1. produce simplex instead of diminutive form2. wrong form of diminutive (augmentative or other)

Errors with gender1. lexical assignment errors =*el serpiente(F) negro(M)

2. agreement error = *la serpiente(F) negro(M)

3. ambiguous = *el serpiente(F) negra(F)

Percentage of errors by group

Type of errors with diminutives

Percentage of individuals who made gender errors in each group

Types of errors with gender

Summary

• Native speakers do not make errors with gender in production

• Many heritage speakers did not make errors either (19/29)

• All the L2 learners made gender errors• The most frequent error (~80%) in both L2

learners and heritage speakers is the one of lexical assignment.*El serpiente(F) negro

Conclusions

• Early language experience confers some advantages to heritage language learners with early acquired aspects of language and in oral production, like gender agreement.

Are there differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers?

YES, but it depends on structures and tasksMetalinguistic tasks favor L2 learnersLess metalinguistic tasks favor heritage

speakers (see Bowles, 2011)Written tasks favor L2 learnersOral tasks favor heritage speakers (proficiency

matters, cf. Au et al. 2002)

Tasks oral/aural written/visual

implicit heritage speakers

explicit L2 learners

Why?

Learning experienceHeritage speakers are child learnersAural input

L2 learners are adult learnersVisual and aural input

Different input and input processing experience.

Gender processing in L1 acquisitionGender is in the lexicon.Children hear sequences of determiners and

nouns in the acoustic input and must identify nouns in the speech stream (through computations or transitional probabilities)

Spanish-speaking children in the one-word stage produce prenominal vowels that coincide with vowels found in determiners (a fó, e pe, ua queca) (López Ornat 2007, Lleó 2001).

Most Recent Experimental Evidence

• Noun-gender associations are strong in the L1 lexicon.

• Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007, 2010): native Spanish speakers and 3-4 year old Spanish speaking children use gender information in determiners to predict nouns (Visual world paradigm).

L2 learners are different• Already know about determiners and nouns from

their L1.• Visual input gives information about word

boundaries and L2 learners do not need to rely as much on distributional properties and transitional probabilities to segment the acoustic stream.

• The association between noun-determiners and noun-gender in the lexicon is not very strong in the L2 (Grüter, Lew-Williams and Fernald, 2010).

• Input modality matters for language processing and production.

How about heritage speakers?

• They are like L1 learners• Their noun-gender lexical associations are

stronger than in L2 learners but weaker than in mature native speakers.

Weaker Links Hypothesis (Gollan et al. 2008)

Why are heritage speakers quantitatively different from native speakers?

Noun-gender associations are part of lexical acquisition.

Reduced input and use of the minority language throughout the school-age period leads to reduced frequency of use of nouns and their associated genders.

Links might have been stronger in childhood but progressively weakened as the first language became the secondary language.

Effects of Weaker Links

• Gender assignment errors• Slower retrieval of nouns in the lexicon• Slower insertion of nouns in the syntax• Reduced speed at computing syntactic

dependencies (concord with determiner and noun)

• Gender agreement errors

Differences in heritage speakers

19 HS did not make any gender errors in the Oral Production task

10 HS didRTs in Spanish PNTHS who made errors 1262 msHS who made no errors 1030 ms

232 (t(29)= 8.54, p < 0.0001)

Why does canonicity (noun ending) matter for L2 learners and Heritage speakers?

Dual mechanism model? (Pinker & Prince 1994, Pinker 1999, Ullman 2002)

Canonical nouns are stored in procedural memory and handled by rule (implicitly acquired in childhood by heritage speakers and learned later but automatized in L2 learners).

(fem –a and masc –o word markers are “regular”, other markers are irregular Harris 1991)

Non-canonical nouns need to be memorized.

Native speakers are not affected

• Reduced input in L2 learners and heritage speaker affects storage in declarative memory.

• Mature native speakers whose primary language is Spanish, do not exhibit gaps with declarative memory because they use the language more frequently and the lexical-association links remain strong for both canonical and non-canonical ending nouns.

Prediction

Native speakers undergoing L1 attrition will make gender errors with non-canonical ending nouns.

Montrul (2011): Alicia, Guatemalan adoptee

Accuracy with Gender in Alicia

Spanish native speakers

Alicia

Oral production 100% 84%

Morphology recognition task

100% 82.5%

Picture identification task

100% 71.8%

Grammaticality judgment task

100% 60%

Alicia’s errors

• Most errors were with non-canonical ending nouns, especially on the picture description task: atleta, planeta, mapa, dentista, país, nuez, luz.

• 7 of 9 errors in the morphology recognition task were with non-canonical ending nouns

Another possibility• Single associative model (canonical and

noncanonical nouns)• Lexical links in L2 learners and heritage speakers

are weaker than in native speakers• Morphophonological cues in Spanish help

activate/access canonical nouns faster and more accurately by virtue of phonological regularity.

• Noncanonical nouns do not have cues• Differences in cues affect strength of lexical links.

Conclusion• Age effects may explain important differences

between L2 learners and heritage speakers• But it is also important to evaluate the

contributing role of experience with the language, as revealed by different tasks.

• Experience affects how input is processed more generally and the type and size of vocabulary L2 learners and heritage speakers may possess.

Conclusion

• Heritage speakers benefited from CDS in Spanish and have retained some of these features (i.e., diminutives)

• Many of the perennial problems observed with gender in advanced L2 learners and heritage speakers seem to be related to issues of lexical assignment rather than of actual syntactic agreement.

Conclusion

• When it comes to gender agreement, a grammatical area that is very difficult for L2 learners to master, heritages speakers show remarkable “native” abilities.

• Differences between native speakers and heritage speakers are due to cumulative input and use of the language throughout the lifespan.

Looking ahead

• Heritage speakers can be really advanced speakers of the language as well, not just “incomplete native speakers” .

• A lot remains to be done to understand the individual differences in language proficiency achieved throughout the lifetime by heritage speakers.

Heritage speakers as native speakers

We also need to focus on the higher end of proficiency and stress that many of these abilities develop in childhood.

Thank you very much!