Brechje van Osch (Utrecht University)

Interface vulnerability in heritage Spanish.

This talk will be about interface phenomena in Spanish as a heritage language. The Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace, 2000) predicts phenomena located at the interfaces between syntax and other domains to be vulnerable in bilingual populations. The external interfaces, such as syntax-discourse or syntax-pragmatics, are expected to be particularly prone to change. I will present data from an acceptability judgment task and an elicited production task which were used to test heritage speakers’ knowledge of the subjunctive and subject verb word order in Spanish. What these two phenomena have in common is that they lie at the crossroads of multiple interfaces, such as the internal interface between syntax and semantics and the external interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics. The findings provide evidence for increased vulnerability at the interfaces, in line with the Interface Hypothesis. I will moreover touch upon the possible explanations underlying this vulnerability: is it a representational issue, a processing issue, or perhaps both?