Grammatical gender in Spanish child heritage speakers: Incomplete or different acquisition?

This study examines grammatical gender (GG) production in young Spanish heritage-speakers (HSs) and the potential effect of the children’s language use and their parents’ input. We compared four and eight-year-old HSs to same-age monolingual children on their gender production. We measured GG production in determiners and adjectives via an elicited production task. HSs’ parents reported children’s time in each language and also completed the elicitation task. Results show that HSs’ scored significantly lower than monolinguals in both grammatical structures in which the unmarked masculine default predominates. However, older HSs had higher accuracy than younger HSs. Input from parents is not correlated with HSs’ performance and neither Spanish use nor language proficiency predicts GG performance on HSs. For theories of language acquisition, it is important to consider that although the linguistic knowledge of the HSs may differ from that of monolinguals, their grammar is protracted rather than incomplete.