Noun canonicity in heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish

The present investigation examines the role of Spanish noun gender-correlated endings when accessing gender agreement in two different linguistic populations: Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish. This study analyzed data from 34 monolingual speakers of Spanish from the Dominican Republic and 44 heritage speakers of Spanish born in the United States who completed a picture naming task in Experiment 1 (determiner-noun agreement) and a picture description task in Experiment 2 (noun-adjective agreement). Results found that canonicity, particularly overt gender marking cues, seemed to have a facilitatory effect for monolingual speakers as seen by significantly faster naming times with transparent nouns on both experiments RTs analysis. However, within the heritage speaker group, no canonicity effects were found on either experiments RTs analyses indicating a difference between the monolingual and bilingual group. There was, however, an effect of noun canonicity in the accuracy rates of both experiments in the monolingual and bilingual group, specifically, a facilitatory effect of transparency, consonant with other studies with heritage speakers and/or monolingual speakers of Spanish (Hur, Lopez and Sanchez 2020; Montrul, Davidson, De La Fuente and Foote 2014; Montrul, De La Fuente, Davidson and Foote 2013; Alarcón 2011; Montrul, Foote and Perpiñán 2008). The main effects of canonicity and frequency found in Experiment 1 monolingual’s RTs analysis and the interaction between frequency and canonicity found in Experiment 2 strongly suggest that canonicity along with noun frequency (noun lexico-syntactic information) have a facilitatory effect in the gender agreement process. Therefore, these results corroborate the predictions of the Two-Route Hypothesis proposed by Gollan and Frost (2001) and psycholinguistic studies that have found a lexico-syntactic route and word-form route to gender access (Caffarra, Jansen and Barber 2014). Findings in the present study contribute to the understanding of different processing mechanisms in two adult populations and to our knowledge of the overall role of predictive nominal endings in gender agreement processes in both monolingual and heritage speakers of Spanish.