Cross-Linguistic Influence between Aymara Evidentiality and Spanish Aspect in Bilingual Heritage Aymara-Spanish Children in the North of Chile

Abstract The present study explored cross-linguistic influence ( CLI ) between Aymara evidentiality and Spanish aspect. Aymara is an indigenous language that grammatically marks the source of information, a feature known as evidentiality. Spanish aspect refers to how an action unfolds in time, such as whether it is completed or ongoing, and is marked by verbal morphemes. Aymara and Spanish are spoken in close proximity in northern Chile, leading to bilingualism and potential interactions between their grammatical systems. Thus, the current investigation tested the Functional Convergence Hypothesis (Sánchez, 2004), which posits that CLI is favored when the matrix of features associated with a functional category is partially divergent. To examine CLI between these structures, 21 heritage Aymara-Spanish children and a baseline group of 19 heritage-bilingual Aymara-Spanish adults performed two forced-choice comprehension tasks, one elicited production task, and one retelling story task in Aymara. Additionally, the same groups and 19 Spanish-dominant children performed a Spanish version of the same tasks. The descriptive results showed that Aymara heritage children assigned evidential value to Spanish aspect morphemes and vice versa in comprehension tasks. Furthermore, the participants frequently used various Spanish compound forms in production, suggesting the emergence of Spanish verbal structures that encode Aymara’s evidential features.