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

Grazia Di Pisa; Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares; Jason Rothman; Theodoros Marinis

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1321614

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

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

Authors

Grazia Di Pisa¹, Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares², Jason Rothman^{3

4}, Theodoros Marinis^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Linguistics, Humanities Section, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
² Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
³ Department of Language and Culture, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
⁴ Faculty of Languages and Education, Nebrija University, Madrid, Spain.
⁵ School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom.

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.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This article was supported by generous funding to TM, JR, GP, and SP by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No. 765556. JR was funded by the Tromsø Forskningsstiftelse (Tromsø Research Foundation) starting grant no. A43484 and the Heritage-bilingual Linguistic Proficiency in their Native Grammar (HeLPiNG; 2019–2023).