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. 2024 Mar 14:15:1321614.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1321614. eCollection 2024.

Being a heritage speaker matters: the role of markedness in subject-verb person agreement in Italian

Grazia Di Pisa  1 , Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares  2 , Jason Rothman  3   4 , Theodoros Marinis  1   5
Affiliations

Being a heritage speaker matters: the role of markedness in subject-verb person agreement in Italian

Grazia Di Pisa et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., io *suona la chitarra "I plays-3rd-person the guitar") yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., il giornalista *esco spesso "the journalist go-1st-person out often"). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs.

Keywords: Italian; grammatical processing; heritage bilingualism; markedness; subject-verb agreement.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
HSs and homeland speakers’ scores on the Italian vocabulary test DIALANG (raw scores). Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’, 0.001 ‘**’, 0.01 ‘*’, 0.05 ‘+’, 0.1 ‘ ’ 1.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean RTs for the HSs by region for grammatical (solid lines) vs. ungrammatical (dotted lines) sentences for 1st-person marked (red) and 3rd-person unmarked (blue).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Mean RTs for the homeland speakers by region for grammatical (solid lines) vs. ungrammatical (dotted lines) sentences for 1st-person marked (red) and 3rd-person unmarked (blue).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Illustration of the three-way interaction between Group (HSs, homeland), Grammaticality (grammatical, ungrammatical), Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked).
Figure 5
Figure 5
(A) Illustration of the two-way interactions between Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked) and Proficiency. (B) Illustration of the two-way interactions between Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked) and HL use in the home.
Figure 6
Figure 6
(A) Illustration of the two-way interactions between Grammaticality (grammatical, ungrammatical) and HL use in the home. (B) Illustration of the two-way interactions between Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked) and HL use in different social contexts.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Illustration of the two-way interactions between Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked) and Type of bilingualism (sequential vs. simultaneous).
Figure 8
Figure 8
Mean response accuracy in percentage for the grammatical and ungrammatical conditions per group in the GJT. The bars represent the standard error to the mean.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Illustration of the two-way interactions between Group (HSs, homeland) and Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked).
Figure 10
Figure 10
(A) Illustration of the two-way interaction between Grammaticality (grammatical, ungrammatical) and HL use in the home. (B) Illustration of the three-way interaction between Grammaticality (grammatical, ungrammatical), Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked) and Proficiency. (C) Illustration of the three-way interaction between Grammaticality (grammatical, ungrammatical), Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked) and HL use in different social contexts. (D) Illustration of the three-way interaction between Grammaticality (grammatical, ungrammatical), Markedness (1st-person marked, 3rd-person unmarked) and Type of bilingualism (sequential vs. simultaneous).
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