Genericity expression in child heritage Spanish

Abstract The current study investigates the oral production of plural noun phrases (NPs) in subject position in Spanish and English among forty child heritage speakers of Spanish who were raised in the United States. Their results were compared with twenty-four monolingual children of similar ages from Mexico. We elicited determiner use in generic and specific contexts in Spanish and English. Results showed a high level of determiner omission with generic referents in Spanish but much less variability with specific referents, suggesting crosslinguistic influence from English. Spanish proficiency played a role in the extent of determiner omission in Spanish generic contexts. Regarding the children’s English, the results showed a high proportion of determiner overextension with generic referents but little variability with specific contexts, suggesting bilingualism effects in sorting out the genericity problem in English. The results are discussed along the lines of the Bilingual Alignment Hypothesis and recent proposals on the effects of proficiency and experience in heritage language acquisition.