The relevance of language-internal variation in predicting heritage language grammars

A roadmap for heritage language research

“…In the keynote, we painted a picture of HL competence using intentionally-broad brushstrokes, thereby allowing for generalizations across a wildly heterogenous population of speakers. Several commentators mentioned that washing out the variation inherent to heritage speakerhood could deprive us of explanatory power (see the commentaries by Embick, White & Tamminga, 2019; Gürel, 2019; Kupisch, 2019; Pearl, 2019; Flores & Rinke, 2019; Valian, 2019). The considerations are twofold.…”

“…The variation among heritage speakers is not chaotic or random; rather, it should be amenable to a set of predictions, and one value of heritage speakers is that they can allow us to observe diachronic change within a single generation. In this regard, we can capitalize on the generalization that heritage speakers amplify tendencies that may be incipient in the baseline, making them more visible to a linguistic researcher (for more on this point, see Flores & Rinke, 2019).…”

“… 1 Several commentators raise the issue of comparison populations for HL research (Embick et al, 2019; Flores & Rinke, 2019; Pearl, 2019; Serratrice, 2019). As we mentioned in our keynote, there is a growing body of evidence showing that some of the changes in a HL are already present in the immigrant baseline but not in the homeland language (for example, the increasing use of overt pronouns in Spanish, starting with the first generation of immigrants, as demonstrated by Otheguy & Zentella, 2012).…”

Morphological processing in heritage speakers: A masked priming study on the Turkish aorist

“…Another hallmark of heritage speakers is the notable variability in their language abilities (e.g., Köpke & Schmid, 2004), which may pose a potential challenge for developing any general model of heritage languages and their speakers. Yet, the variability among heritage speakers may not be chaotic or random (Putnam, Kupisch & Pascual y Cabo, 2018) and may provide insights that are less directly available from non-heritage baseline languages and their speakers (Flores & Rinke, 2020).…”

Heritage languages, infants’ language recognition, and artificial grammars for bilingualism research

“…Meisel (2020) argues that the precise role of input for language acquisition is largely unknown, and Serratrice (2020) claims that in addition to the input, a child's own particular patterns of language use are relevant for understanding heritage languages. Flores and Rinke (2020) note that due to the particular ‘colloquial’ input heritage speakers are exposed to, heritage grammars are more likely to retain characteristics of non-standard varieties. Embick, White and Tamminga (2020) as well as Valian (2020) observe that variability in a learner's input may be hugely beneficial for successful language acquisition, as shown in other studies, and that heritage speakers typically receive input from a limited number of speakers, which may account for some of the divergence between heritage and standard grammars.…”