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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Bilingualism
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1449315
This article is part of the Research Topic The Role of Literacy and Schooling in Heritage Language Maintenance and Growth View all 4 articles

The Impact of L1 Literacy on the Production of Spanish Verbal Passives by School-Age Spanish Heritage Speakers

Provisionally accepted
Andrew Armstrong Andrew Armstrong *Silvina Montrul Silvina Montrul *
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Acquiring literacy contributes to monolingual children's language development, especially with the oral production of complex sentences. However, less is known about how written language exposure impacts first language (L1) morphosyntactic growth in Spanish-speaking children in the U.S., who are educated in their second language (L2) and have little opportunities to develop L1 literacy. To investigate this, we evaluated 8-12-year-old Spanish heritage speakers' (HSs) L1 production accuracy of grammatical gender and full verbal passives using picture description and elicited imitation (EI) tasks. One group of HSs attended bilingual (English-Spanish) schools and had developed strong L1 literacy skills; the other group attended English-only schools and had weaker L1 literacy skills, confirmed with standardized literacy tasks. The children receiving literacy instruction and textual exposure in Spanish (the L1) outperformed those attending schools in English only, producing gender agreement more accurately and full passives more accurately. They also outperformed the children in English-only schools in literacy and cognitive measures. These findings indicate that experience with textual input via L1 literacy development is an effective way to aid the acquisition and production of complex linguistic forms in HSs during the school-age period.

    Keywords: Heritage speakers, Elicited imitation (El), Passives, Grammatical Gender, literacy

    Received: 14 Jun 2024; Accepted: 13 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Armstrong and Montrul. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Andrew Armstrong, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, United States
    Silvina Montrul, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, United States

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