 ./ihll..cuz ©  John Benjamins Publishing Company he protracted acquisition of past tense aspectual values in child heritage Spanish* Alejandro Cuza & Lauren Miller Purdue University his study examines the knowledge of past tense aspectual distinctions in Spanish among 19 Spanish-English bilingual children born and raised in the United States. We compare their results with those of 12 of the children’s parents, who are long-term immigrants of Mexican background. We predicted more diiculties among the bilingual children with increasing age as well as strong correlations between performance and language dominance. As expected, the bilingual children showed low production of the imperfect form in characterizing situations, crucially with eventive predicates, but no deicits with the use of the preterit. In contrast to what was expected, target performance was not correlated with language dominance, and we found no correlation between performance and developmental age. However, at the individual level, the older children outperformed the younger children despite more prolonged contact with English. his contrasts with previous research claiming L1 attrition throughout the life span of the bilingual child to account for heritage speakers’ diiculties. Regarding the children’s parents, they all behaved at ceiling and showed no signs of attrition. Keywords: Child heritage Spanish; tense and aspect; crosslinguistic inluence efects; L1 attrition . Introduction he acquisition of past tense aspectual distinctions in Spanish occurs without inci- dent in non-pathological irst (L1) language development, as evidenced by a propor- tional use of preterit and imperfect tense forms by the age of 3 (Hernández-Pina, 1984; Pérez-Pereira, 1989; Sebastian & Slobin, 1994). his success in the acquisition * We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and sug- gestions as well as the audience of the 2013 Hispanic Linguistic Symposium. We would also like to thank all the parents and children for their time and assistance.