This thesis examines whether heritage speakers of Spanish pattern like monolingually-raised Spanish speakers in their processing of Spanish noun-adjective gender agreement during real-time sentence comprehension. Errors in an all feminine context (underspecification) and errors in an all masculine context (feature clash) were studied to determine whether the morphological variability that has been attested in adult L2 learners of Spanish similarly occurs in heritage speakers of Spanish. Eye-tracking was utilized to track participants’ sensitivity to violations of noun-adjective gender agreement. The results revealed that heritage speakers of Spanish did pattern monolingual-like in their sensitivity to violations of noun-adjective gender agreement when gender of the head noun (feminine vs masculine) was not considered. However, when noun gender was factored into the analyses, heritage speakers patterned like monolinguals in later measures, but it one early measure (gaze times on adjectives), they were only sensitive to errors of feature clash.
