%0 Journal Article 
%A Liceras, Juana M.
%A Senn, Cristina
%T Linguistic theory and the analysis of minority languages: native, immigrant and heritage Spanish
%D 2009
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/11244
%X In this paper we aim to contribute to the emerging field of heritage
studies by investigating whether Spanish heritage speakers in
Canada, namely the second or subsequent generation of Spanish
speakers who grew up as English-Spanish bilinguals, differ from
native Spanish speakers (those who have always lived in a Spanishspeaking
country) and from immigrant Spanish speakers (those who
immigrated to Canada as adults) with respect to their grammatical
competence and to their processing strategies. Taking as a point of
departure recent proposals from linguistic theory, we provide a
description of Spanish restrictive relative clauses with so-called
resumptive pronouns (Es una mujer que nunca LA vimos llorar) in
order to determine whether and how our three groups of speakers
differ in terms of the grammatical intuitions and processing resources
they display when confronted with this type of constructions. We
discuss to what extent language attrition, influence from English (in
the case of both immigrant and heritage speakers), or incomplete
acquisition (in the case of heritage speakers) may be behind the
characteristics of the immigrant and the heritage speakers’ linguistic
behaviour. We argue that sophisticated experimental tasks provide a
better tool than global proficiency tests to compare these three
groups of speakers. The ultimate aim of this study is to provide a
framework for analyzing the status of the minority languages spoken
by immigrant communities.

%K Heritage speakers
%K Immigrant speakers
%K Late contact bilinguals
%K Early contact bilinguals
%K Grammatical competence
%K Processing abilities
%K Ambiguity resolution
%K Resumptive pronouns
%K Near native speaker
%K Acceptability Judgments
%K Language attrition
%K Incomplete acquisition
%K Interlinguistic influence
%K Minority language
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala