Agreement in Heritage Morphology: Past Forms in Veneto Speakers from Australia and Canada

Abstract

The acquisition of functional morphology is one of the main challenges for second language learners (Lardiere, 1998, 2005; Slabakova, 2009), but very little is known about morphological representations in Heritage speakers, (Albirini et al., 2013; Montrul et al., 2008) needless to say in Veneto. The aim of the current study is to investigate the expression of subject-verb agreement in past tenses in Veneto Heritage Speakers Canadian and Australian-born.

In Veneto all verbs agree in person and number, and in the Passato Prossimo forms (with essere) also in gender. Contrariwise, agreement in English is not active in the past tense (except for the copula was/were). Hence, Veneto Heritage Speakers whose majority language is English, may find it difficult to master the agreement in the past. In order to describe the distribution and frequency of use of this phenomenon, 20 Veneto heritage speakers (7 Canadian and 13 Australian-born), aged between 54 and 68 years old participated in the study, further grouped according to their heritage language exposure (shorter vs. longer). Their performance has been compared with a group of 5 age-matched native speakers residents in the Veneto region.

Participants were video recorded and completed a language background questionnaire 3 oral tasks that elicited past forms: 1- picture narrative task with 23 verbs (13 targeting a perfective form, 10 an imperfect form); 2- picture description targeted simultaneous actions through; 3- semantic interpretation task. All of them adapted into Dialetto Veneto from the SPLLOC project http://www.splloc.soton.ac.uk/index.html.

Overall, results showed that participants only produced the Passato Prossimo (not the Imperfect form) with a defective past participle form. Moreover, a good amount of errors in subject/verb agreement concerned gender, where participants produced masculine instead of the target feminine, hence resorting to a default form to express agreement (Bruhn de Garavito, 2003). This was observed in both short and long exposure groups, surprisingly was more frequently in the latter even though they are more accurate in the semantic interpretation.