An analysis of within-language cumulative priming also revealed that repeated exposure to Spanish preposition-stranded sentences facilitated processing for some late bilinguals. Heritage speakers who had lower fluency in Spanish than English did not show a priming effect, but they processed Spanish preposition-stranded sentences the fastest and gave higher acceptability ratings, suggesting that preposition stranding may be a feature of their Spanish. The results indicate that exposure to preposition stranding in English primed the comprehension of structurally-parallel, but illicit, Spanish sentences for some heritage speakers and all late bilinguals. Results were subjected to group-level and individual differences analyses with mixed-effects modeling to determine whether any measurable priming effects were influenced by individual differences in exposure, use, and proficiency for Spanish and English. To test this hypothesis, a novel cross-linguistic structural priming experiment based on self-paced listening was conducted with a group of heritage Spanish speakers and late Spanish-English bilinguals to test whether exposure to preposition stranding in English-a feature of core syntax that does not exist in Spanish-could facilitate processing of (ungrammatical) preposition stranding in a subsequently encountered Spanish sentence. This study examines real-time heritage language syntactic processing and tests the hypothesis that some commonly observed properties of heritage languages-apparent instability in grammatical knowledge and divergence from monolingual grammatical norms-can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the socially dominant language during online processing.
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