Julia Grote

The production of grammatical gender has been studied in order to understand which factors may account for variability in Heritage Speakers of Spanish—i.e., Spanish-English bilinguals raised in Spanish-speaking homes in the United States. In Spanish, inanimate nouns carry grammatical gender (either masculine or feminine). Gender can be canonically marked by the typical feminine ending -a or the typical masculine ending -o, or non-canonically with opaque noun endings. Word frequency and noun canonicity have been shown to play a significant role in heritage speakers’ grammatical gender patterns (Hur et al., 2020). Building on this research, a similar Elicited Production Task (EPT) to that of Hur et al.’s (2020) study was employed with 40 Heritage Speakers, eliciting 40 total sentences each via visual prompts with target canonical and non-canonical inanimate nouns. Twenty participants’ data were transcribed from audio recordings and coded for grammatical gender accuracy. We analyzed the relationship between participants’ accuracy and their self-assessments of word frequency and frequency of Spanish use with family. The results were found to be consistent with overall success in marking grammatical gender for canonical masculine and feminine nouns—100% and 98.1%, respectively—regardless of their individual frequency ratings. In addition to this, the non-canonical masculine nouns also exhibited near-ceiling accuracy—99.08%—across all 20 speakers. The target nouns with the most variability in accuracy of assignment were the non-canonical feminine nouns with a group average of 82.56% accuracy. Higher ratings of a noun’s frequency correlated significantly with a higher percentage of accuracy on non-canonical feminine nouns. Participants who used Spanish often with their family members also tended to display higher accuracy with these nouns. The word frequency finding highlights the importance of incorporating speakers’ own language experiences into research on minoritized language communities.