We examine morphosyntactic knowledge of Labrador Inuttitut by Inuit receptive bilinguals (RBs) – heritage speakers who are capable of comprehension, but produce little or no speech. A grammaticality judgment study suggests that RBs possess sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations, though to a lesser degree than fluent bilinguals. Low-proficiency RBs are sensitive only to the most basic grammatical properties. Case omission is most difficult to detect, but morphemes bearing incorrect features (case oversuppliance, number agreement mismatch) or ordered incorrectly (tense and agreement, tense and negation) are easier, and performance on incorrect ordering of morphemes is near target with the core agreement morpheme for all RBs. While receptive bilinguals show patterns of grammatical deficits, they also demonstrate clear knowledge of the basic properties of word structure in Inuttitut. This has implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization efforts.

This paper describes the process of designing, administering, and assessing a language-sensitive and culture-specific lexical test of Labrador Inuttitut (a dialect of Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language). This process presented numerous challenges, from choosing citation forms in a polysynthetic language to dealing with a lack of word frequency data. Twenty heritage receptive bilinguals (RBs) with very limited production skills in Inuttitut (their first language) and a comparison group of eight fluent bilinguals (FBs) participated in our study. Since the RBs lacked production skills in Inuttitut, the lexical test required participants to translate a carefully compiled list of Inuttitut nouns and verbs into English. The results revealed that RBs had good comprehension of basic vocabulary (85% accuracy), but differed significantly from FBs, mostly because the RBs had a number of partially accurate translations. The three lowest scoring RBs had the highest number of such translations as well as inaccurate translations based on phonological associations, as is common in emergent lexicons. This lexical test correlates with grammatical proficiency measures, pointing to its potential value as a quick placement and diagnostic test in revitalization programs for Inuttitut as well as other languages in a language loss situation.

Heritage receptive bilinguals (RBs) are individuals who report understanding but not speaking their family language. This study tests whether semantic features of functional morphemes, namely tense, aspect, and agreement markers, are accessible to them in comprehension. RBs in this study are fluent speakers of English with receptive knowledge of Labrador Inuttitut. Many RBs showed fluent-like comprehension of aspectual suffixes, subject-object-verb agreement suffixes, and past versus future contrasts in tense suffixes, but most could not identify remoteness degrees in tense suffixes. Lowest-proficiency RBs did not show knowledge of any morphemes. Remoteness features are missing from most RBs' grammars; the same applies to many features in LRBs' grammars. Some RBs showed inconsistent performance: better than chance, but worse than fluent speakers. The corresponding parts of RBs' grammars are therefore fluent-like, but access to them is difficult. RBs' grammars consist of fluent-like parts, parts with reduced access, and incomplete parts.

The term ‘receptive bilingualism/multilingualism’ is used for diverse populations, all of which understand a language without producing speech in it, but differ in the way this receptive ability was achieved and in the linguistic knowledge underlying it. In previous studies, not enough attention is given to the differences between types of receptive bilinguals (RBs); however, a thorough analysis of all types is necessary to understand the nature of receptive bilingualism and, consequently, language comprehension and production in general. I propose a classification of RBs based on the presence and nature of an acquisition process that led to receptive abilities. In this classification, RBs who comprehend a language mutually intelligible with one they know are distinguished from RBs with acquired knowledge. Within the former, RBs with and without previous exposure are distinguished. Within acquired types, RBs who comprehend a heritage language are distinguished from RBs who comprehend a second/foreign language.