Bilingual children and adult heritage speakers: The range of comparison

Abstract

This paper compares the language of child bilinguals and adult unbalanced bilinguals (heritage speakers) against that of bilingual native speakers of their home language (baseline). We identify four major vectors of correspondence across the language spoken by these three groups. First, all varieties may represent a given linguistic property in a similar way (child bilinguals = adult heritage speakers = bilingual native speakers of their home language). This occurs when either (i) the property in question is highly robust and is acquired by learners without difficulty or (ii) the property is already in decline in the baseline. We illustrate scenario (i) with data from Russian count forms, which are morphologically quite complex. The preservation of these forms in child bilinguals and adult heritage speakers suggests that simplicity of encoding is not the only factor determining robustness of retention. Second, child and heritage speakers may share a linguistic structure that differs from the one found in the baseline (bilingual native speakers of their home language ≠ child bilinguals = adult heritage speakers). This scenario occurs when incipient structural changes in the baseline become amplified in the language of next-generation bilinguals, or when a given structure is rare, confined to a specific register, and/or reinforced through literacy. Third, a structure may be acquired by bilingual children faithfully, but undergo reanalysis/attrition in the adult heritage language (bilingual native speakers of their home language = child bilinguals ≠ adult heritage speakers). Russian relativization illustrates this scenario; child bilinguals show native-like performance on relative clauses but adult heritage speakers show an exaggerated subject preference in the interpretation of gaps. Finally, a structure that is not fully learned by child speakers may be reanalyzed by adult heritage speakers following general principles, thus bringing the adult heritage representation closer to that of the baseline (bilingual native speakers of their home language = adult heritage speakers ≠ child bilinguals). Heritage speakers’ production and comprehension of psychological predicates in Spanish illustrates this possibility.

Understanding heritage languages

“…Attrition evidences the central role of maintenancea use-it-or-lose-it admonitionin our grammatical knowledge; the extent to which first language skills are lost has a direct relationship to the age of onset of bilingualism (Bylund, 2009;Flores, 2010Flores, , 2012Montrul, 2008Montrul, , 2011Montrul, , 2016Pallier, 2007). In studying attrition, there are two tacks to take: 1) longitudinal studies documenting the loss of linguistic abilities in heritage speakers over their early lifetime (e.g., Anderson, 1999;Merino, 1983;Silva-Corvalán, 2003, or 2) a comparison of the abilities of heritage-speaker children vs. adults (e.g., Montrul, 2016;Polinsky, 2011Polinsky, , 2018a. In the latter case, the reasoning goes as follows: if heritage-speaker adults are shown to perform differently from the relevant baseline, but heritage-speaker children do not, then the deviation in adults is most likely due to attrition over the lifetime.…”

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

“…At the present time, when HLD findings have reached considerable accumulation (Montrul, 2016;Polinsky, 2018b), an important disciplinary conversation has begun to take place. For example, there has been a move toward giving the bilingualism of heritage language speakers a central place in research programs (Aalberse & Hulk, 2018;Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2013;Polinsky, 2018a). Some prominent voices have gone far in arguing also that HL speakers are legitimate native speakers of their minority language (Kupisch & Rothman, 2018;Pascual y Cabo & Rothman, 2012), some even proposing that this is the case regardless of nativelike attainment in the HL (Rothman & Treffers-Daller, 2014).…”

The Development of Subject Position in Dutch-Dominant Heritage Speakers of Spanish: From Age 9 to Adulthood

“…What is less clear, currently, is exactly how these grammars come to be the way they are. Several explanations, or scenario's (Polinsky 2018), have been proposed in the literature, which are not mutually exclusive. First of all, heritage speakers differ from monolinguals in terms of the amount of exposure and use of the heritage language, especially from school age onwards.…”