Heritage speakers—bilinguals who acquire minority languages naturalistically in infancy but are typically majority-language-dominant in adulthood—generally acquire grammars that differ systematically from the baseline input received in childhood. Yet not all areas diverge equally; understanding what characterizes divergence or resilience of a given feature is crucial to understanding heritage language acquisition. In this realm, we investigate the discourse-conditioned non-canonical word orders that mark information focus in Spanish. Focus bears the hallmarks of structures that diverge from the baseline, yet the evidence is mixed. We use an offline forced-choice task and an online self-paced reading task to compare heritage speakers’ judgments and processing to the baseline’s, and we find, echoing recent work, that the heritage speakers largely resemble baseline speakers. We interpret this convergence with reference to seven factors potentially affecting heritage language acquisition and identify one hypothesis—that focus facilitates processing due to its structural and pragmatic salience—as a promising explanation.

传统语言使用者——在婴儿期自然习得少数语言但在成年后通常以多数语言占主导地位的双语者——通常习得的语法与童年时接受的基线输入有系统的不同。然而，并非所有领域都存在同样的差异。了解特定特征的分歧或弹性的特征对于理解遗产语言习得至关重要。在这个领域，我们研究标记信息焦点的话语条件非规范词序在西班牙语中。焦点具有偏离基线的结构特征，但证据却好坏参半。我们使用离线强制选择任务和在线自定进度阅读任务来将传统说话者的判断和处理与基线的进行比较，我们发现，与最近的研究相呼应，传统说话者在很大程度上类似于基线说话者。我们参考了七个可能影响传统语言习得的因素来解释这种趋同，并确定了一个假设——焦点由于其结构和语用显着性而促进了处理——作为一种有希望的解释。