The Effects of Incomplete Acquisition on Grammatical Gender Agreement in Heritage Speakers

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 2,0, Technical University of Braunschweig (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The following paper compares and contrasts three different studies in order to investigate, whether grammatical gender agreement in heritage speakers involves incomplete acquisition, and if so, how gender agreement is affected by this and other factors like age of onset and context of acquisition. The papers by Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñán (2008) and Alarcón (2011) analyse Spanish heritage speakers, whereas the study by Polinsky (2008) focuses on American Russian heritage speakers. In this paper, all three studies are analysed in order to compare the participants, the procedure and the specific results concerning grammatical gender under incomplete acquisition across different languages. The analysis of the papers is followed by a general discussion of their main outcome. In the end, I will conclude the overall results and provide an outlook.