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Event-Related Potential (ERP) Evidence and the Continuum of Nativeness: Considering Agreement Processing in Spanish as a Heritage Language.

Poster B37 in Poster Session B and Reception, Thursday, October 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm EDT, Millennium Hall

Alicia Luque¹, César Rosales², Megan Nakamura², Eleonora Rossi², Jason Rothman^1,3; ¹UiT The Arctic University of Norway, ²University of Florida, ³Nebrija University

Heritage speaker (HS) bilinguals are native speakers of their heritage language (cf. Rothman & Treffers-Daller, 2014). Like homeland speakers of the same language, HSs acquire their heritage language (HL) early and naturalistically. Differently, however, they often do so in a context of significantly reduced input and/or opportunities (over the lifespan) to use the language in a comparatively similar way. It is no surprise then that a substantial amount of research over the past decades has documented significant differences between HS and homeland native speakers (Montrul, 2016, Polinsky, 2018; Polinsky & Scontras, 2020) across a wide array of grammatical domains. Whether or not this is equally true in linguistic processing is not as clear given the disproportionate number of studies utilizing offline behavioral methods. For example, behavioral HS studies would lead us to the conclusion that grammatical gender is vulnerable in Spanish as a HL in the context of the United States (US) (e.g. Montrul, Foote & Perpiñan, 2008). However, will neural signatures during grammatical processing confirm or problematize such a conclusion (see Bayram et al. 2022)? Herein, we seek to begin to fill the gap in neurolinguistic methods applied to HS linguistic processing in an otherwise well-studied domain of grammar. To do this, in this study we focused on grammatical gender processing in Spanish, which has been well researched at both the behavioral and neural (ERP) levels across homeland native Spanish speakers and even L2 learners, but only behaviorally in HSs (no neuroimaging studies exist). Given the significant numbers of homeland native EEG studies on grammatical gender, which converge on at least robust P600 (sometimes accompanied by eLAN), for gender agreement anomalies, we have a solid basis of comparison for the current study. EEG/ERP data was collected from 30 Spanish-English heritage speakers in the US with diverse bilingual experiences. Participants were asked to read a total of 360 sentences in Spanish presented word-by-word, including number and gender agreement violations (concord on the adjective), while their brain activity was being recorded using EEG/ERPs. Preliminary analyses of the neural data reveal clear P600 effects, the brain response generally associated with morphosyntactic error processing (see Morgan-Short, 2014), for both the number and gender agreement conditions (see Figure 1). These preliminary results reveal both systematicity and target processing of these domains of grammar among HSs of Spanish in the US. If the pattern continues to be borne out in the larger sample we target by the time of presentation (n=50/60), these data will provide strong support for the argued need and importance of incorporating online neuroimaging measures of grammatical processing in heritage language bilingual empiricism, to complement offline behavioral measures and, especially, as a checks and balance to them (Bayram et al., 2022). Whereas behavioral studies on grammatical gender in HSs of Spanish in the US often conclude that gender is a particularly vulnerable domain, the present EEG data strongly suggest that gender is robustly represented and deployed for real-time processing qualitatively the same way as in homeland baseline speakers.

Topic Areas: Syntax, Multilingualism