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

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 tha

SUBMITTER: Di Pisa G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10972983 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature