<p dir="ltr">The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers—that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child participants had at least one parent who was born and raised in a Spanish-speaking country before immigrating to the U.S. post-puberty. Eleven (11) of the adults/parents, (aged 18 to 60 years, Med=42; STD=8.5)—all native speakers of Spanish—participated with their children, providing a control group for comparison purposes. Specifically, the study examined whether child heritage speakers of Spanish have linguistic intuition that enables them to<i> </i>distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs of gender expression in Spanish heard in ordinary speech (Chomsky, 1965). An Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) presented each of the participants with both grammatical and ungrammatical versions of Spanish sentences in four grammatical conditions: (a) determiner-noun (DET-NOUN) assignment, (b) determiner-adjective (DET-ADJ) agreement, (c) noun-adjective (NOUN-ADJ) agreement, and (d) determiner phrase (DP) directionality (Cuza & Perez Tattam, 2016). Results showed that the participants—both children and adults—correctly found the grammatical examples to be acceptable. The adult participants consistently rejected the ungrammatical examples while many of the child participants had difficulties recognizing the ungrammatical examples as unacceptable. Statistical analysis found that the external factors of language dominance and language experience were significant in relation to the ability to distinguish the ungrammatical items, suggesting that the children who were dominant in Spanish and had more experience with the language were also more likely to recognize the ungrammatical constructs of the language. This result is in keeping with the Bilingual Alignments Approach, which focuses on the correlation of expected responses with the external factors of language dominance and language experience (Sánchez, 2019).</p>

In view of the scarcity of studies that in Sweden aim to investigate the relationship between motivation and linguistic competence of heritage speakers (Montrul, 2010: 9), the present study has two objectives: (a) examine if motivation, here understood as total motivation, is correlated with language proficiency of Spanish heritage speakers, enrolled in mother tongue classes, and (b) determine whether or not the underlying motivational subtype is decisive for the learning results, in Spanish, achieved by these students.    The motivation and linguistic proficiency of 51 students were surveyed through a questionnaire based, in part, on the self-determination theory and a proficiency test divided in two parts: a cloze test and a multiple-choice test. Owing to the limitations of the study, the main group studied consisted of 41 students, who were either born in Sweden or had arrived here before the onset of puberty, defined as an age of more than 11.     The analyses showed that only the identified regulation, a more autonomous type of extrinsic motivation, is related to the heritage speakers’ score on the cloze test, hence indicating that the concept of relatedness emphasized by Ryan &amp; Deci (2000) and the value placed on the Spanish language by this group, is linked with the range of their lexical knowledge. Factors that could influence the group’s linguistic proficiency, such as the number of hours spent speaking Spanish each time it was used (more or less than three hours) and the years of residency in a Spanish speaking country, were also investigated. Only the first variable, contact hours, showed a statistical significance; the second variable did not. These findings might lead to the reflection that although parental involvement is crucial, heritage speakers’ linguistic development requires a concerted effort not only by the parents, but also the school and the educational institutions, encouraging students to explore their identity and linguistic background through activities directly related to their own self-perceptions and interests.