Modern Languages and Cultures

There has been a growing interest in the examination of the steady state of simultaneous bilinguals. An understanding of what leads to the possible weaknesses in the grammar of early bilinguals can contribute to our understanding of the possible causes of the apparent ...

The Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) has been studied on numerous occasions, addressing, in particular, the capabilities and limitations of the second language learner (Gürel, 2003; Kanno, 1997; Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1997; Rothman & Iverson, 2007). However, studies are increasingly showing that the OPC may not be an unyielding restriction on grammar, as previously proposed by Montalbetti (1984) (Alonso-Ovalle, Fernández Solera, Frazier & Clifton, 2002; Gelormini-Lezama, Huepe, Herrera, Melloni, Manes, García & Ibáñez, 2016; Keating, Jegerski, & VanPatten, 2016; Lipski, 1996). This study looks at the interpretation restrictions of the OPC by 20 Spanish heritage and 20 monolingual speakers in two experimental tasks: a sentence selection task and a picture-matching task. Results reveal that while participants show a preference towards the interpretation restrictions of the OPC, they do not respond at ceiling, which allows for variability. Additionally, the heritage speaker group varies from the monolinguals, indicating further divergence. This work provides a descriptive analysis of the findings and contributes to the dialogue on the flexibility of the OPC on language.

Given that most postsecondary institutions have recognized the need to prepare interculturally competent undergraduates, this study used the Intercul-tural Development Inventory to measure the extent to which one group of undergraduate learners demonstrated increased intercultural competence after taking a first-semester foreign language (FL) course. Drawing on research on the role of culture in the FL curriculum and on intercultural competence development, the findings illustrate that (a) beginner-level language courses contribute minimally to students' intercultural competence development, and (b) FL departments need to substantially redesign their beginner-level curriculum if they hope to contribute in meaningful ways to their institution's intercultural, diversity, global learning, and/or 21st-century goals. The data suggest that in addition to re-envisioning the beginner and intermediate FL

This study investigates the grammar of Spanish and Polish heritage speakers in Canada: Speakers who grew up speaking their family language at home, where the community language is English. Studies looking at the language of heritage speakers investigate the stability of language and how grammar develops under reduced input conditions (Benmamoun et al., 2010). The aim of this work is to investigate the impact of reduced input on a component within the Null-Subject Parameter-the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti, 1984). The goal is to understand the interpretations that heritage speakers assign to overt pronouns in very specific contexts. The OPC is a restriction on an overt pronoun's possible coreferent. It states the restrictions on this pronoun when its coreferent is a quantified expression (someone, who). As null-subject languages, in Spanish and Polish an overt pronoun in the subordinate clause cannot be bound by a quantified expression (Nadie i cree que él j/*i va a ganar 'No one believes that he will win'). The overt pronoun needs to be free within its binding domain. Following Montalbetti (1984), I assume that all quantifiers will be treated equally. Moreover, following a generative framework, it is assumed that that the Null Subject Parameter is set early in the grammars of these null-subject heritage languages (Chomsky, 1981; Jaeggli, 1982; Rizzi, 1982), and thus they will demonstrate understanding of the interpretative restrictions found with subordinate overt pronouns with quantified antecedents. Results from this study were gathered from four groups of speakers with 20 participants in each group: Spanish heritage, Spanish monolingual, Polish heritage, Polish monolingual. Participants completed two comprehension tasks: a Picture-Matching task, and a Sentence-Selection task. Both tasks tested interpretation of the implicit knowledge of the OPC with quantified antecedents. iii Results for the Picture-Matching task show that advanced heritage speakers understand the interpretative contrast present with overt and null pronouns within OPC contexts. However, heritage speakers appear to have more difficulty in the Sentence-Selection task: They do not differentiate between null and overt pronouns. Results suggest lower-proficiency participants have difficulty with the reading/comprehension component of the task, but the OPC remains in their grammars.

This research investigates incomplete acquisition and attrition in nominal case inflection in Polish heritage speakers in Canada. Incomplete acquisition found in heritage speakers occurs when there is an abrupt interruption in the input of the L1 due to lack of language contact, when the speaker becomes isolated from other speakers of the minority language, and the community language becomes the dominant language (Schmid and De Bot, 2004; Anderson, 1999). Attrition, on the other hand is observed once a grammatical aspect is fully acquired, stabilized and then lost due to an interruption in the language input. This case study followed one adult Polish heritage speaker born and raised in Canada who completed one guided production task. Results show evidence of significant language loss and a full restructuring of nominal case inflection in Polish, where the six-case system has been reconstructed to three cases with two being fully productive.

This article has two primary goals: First, the aim is to show how monolingual Spanish speakers react to the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti 1984) within specific contexts that were elicited and/or forced. Past work that has been done on the OPC used monolinguals as control subjects in second language acquisition studies. The Pérez-Leroux & Glass (1999) study was based on stories that required one sentence to be translated (in written form) by the participants, which would indicate whether or not the controls (and the second language learner) followed the constraint proposed by Montalbetti. All L2ers performed significantly well on the task, however the monolinguals appear to fall behind, indicating an acceptance for a bound reading with an overt subject pronoun 13% of the time. As insignificant as this may seem, the authors do not explain why there would be such a difference between the monolinguals and the advanced group 1 . In the study done by Rothman and Iverson (200...