The impact of L1 literacy on L1 morphosyntactic development and the production of verbal passives in school-age Spanish heritage speakers and L1 Spanish adults

After the acquisition of core grammar during early childhood, individuals experience an important phase of later language development during the school-age period. Despite this, how linguistic growth during middle childhood progresses remains understudied. One important process that defines the school-age period is the acquisition of literacy skills and increased text exposure. This provides input that is syntactically more complex than oral input, and it promotes children’s morphosyntactic development by providing exposure to complex sentence structures that occur more in written language. However, for heritage speakers (HSs, aka English Learners) who are typically educated in their second language (L2), more research is needed on the consequences of reduced first language (L1) literacy on L1 morphosyntactic development. This dissertation aimed to examine the effect of L1 literacy development on the oral production of Spanish morphosyntax in a group of 8-12-year-old Spanish HSs. It also investigated L1 Spanish adults with different levels of formal education to consider the impact of text experience in mature native speakers. Experiment 1 measured participants’ Spanish literacy and working memory development. Experiment 2 evaluated their grammatical production and story structure in oral narratives. Experiment 3 tested knowledge of the morphosyntactic aspects of grammatical gender. And Experiment 4 employed an elicited imitation task to evaluate the production of full verbal passives, a complex morphosyntactic structure that is more common in written language. The results indicated that among the Spanish HSs, stronger L1 literacy generally resulted in oral production with greater morphosyntactic complexity and more accurate complex forms, including full verbal passives. The impact of literacy on verbal passive production was less evident in adults, but their amount of text exposure still influenced the lexical diversity and grammatical complexity of their production in general. The findings provide evidence that L1 literacy makes significant contributions to the development of complex morphosyntax in school-age HSs and is an effective input source to help promote linguistic growth in this population. They also suggest language experience with text exerts some effects in the oral production of adults as well.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Armstrong, Andrew

Contributors dc:contributor

• Montrul, Silvina
• Christianson, Kiel
• Ionin, Tania
• Montag, Jessica

• Heritage Speakers
• Literacy
• Morphosyntax
• Oral Narratives
• Elicited Imitation

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Andrew Armstrong

Language dc:language

eng, en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/127318

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F127318