The interplay between syntactic and morphological comprehension in heritage contexts: the case of relative clauses in heritage Syrian Arabic

Abstract

Previous studies show that even though monolingual children find subject relatives easier than object relatives, their comprehension of object relatives can be facilitated by morphological cues. Given that in heritage contexts functional morphology is a vulnerable domain, a question that needs to be addressed is whether bilingual children, who are heritage speakers of their L1, will also be able to use morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax. To contribute to this line of research, we focused on monolingual (N = 18; Mean Age: 11.43) and bilingual/first generation (N = 108; Mean Age: 11.98), Syrian Arabic-speaking children in Canada, and examined their ability to use gender morphology in their comprehension of relative clauses, while taking into consideration cognitive, environmental, and age-related variables. To this end, we used two offline sentence-picture matching tasks targeting relative clauses and gender (as encoded in SV agreement and object clitics). Results showed that, like monolingual children, first-generation, Arabic-speaking children living in Canada used morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax in their L1. Furthermore, even though there was an association between comprehension of gender agreement and comprehension of relative clauses, performance in gender agreement was higher than performance in relative clauses, suggesting that challenges with complex syntactic structures are not necessarily an epiphenomenon of a morphological deficit.