This paper focuses on the linguistic competence of adult Portuguese-German bilinguals in their heritage language, European Portuguese (EP), which they acquired at home in early childhood in the context of German as the majority language. Based on a grammaticality judgment test, we investigate their morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics. The central questions are whether possible deviations from native monolinguals may be traced back to a) lack of contact with the formal register; b) reduced input after preschool age; and c) cross-linguistic influence. The results reveal qualitative differences between the heritage speakers and a group of monolingual controls in almost all test conditions. We conclude that although the linguistic knowledge of the heritage bilinguals investigated in this study differs from that of monolinguals, it is not "deficient" but "different" and "innovative", because it is primarily based on the spoken variety of the language and because it promotes linguistic changes which are inherent in the speech of native monolinguals.

This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.

This paper investigates object omissions in the spontaneous production of European Portuguese by second-generation Portuguese-German bilingual speakers and compares them to first-generation migrants, and two age-matched groups of monolingual speakers. The results show that bilingual speakers as well as the younger generation of monolinguals show a higher number of null objects in their speech than the two older generations. This may reflect an inter-generational development that favours null objects, which is independent of language contact. The analysis of the syntactic and semantic conditions determining the occurrence of null objects in the speech of the different groups reveals that the semantic properties of the null objects realized by the bilinguals, particularly the higher rates of animate and non-propositional null objects, show that they extend the semantic-pragmatic conditions of null object realization along a referential hierarchy. The bilingual speakers may reflect a language-internal pathway that appears to resemble a diachronic change observed in BP.

No abstract

Several studies on heritage language (HL) acquisition investigate a single linguistic structure, showing how language exposure or cross-linguistic effects affect its acquisition. Here, we consider HL speaking children's mastery of several linguistic structures using a cloze-test. We examine how their language competence is affected by language exposure variables and age. We tested 180 children between the ages of 8 and 16, living in Switzerland and speaking European Portuguese as HL and French, German or Italian as their societal language. The items of the cloze-test cluster around two levels of difficulty, with the items at the second level corresponding to structures that are acquired late in Portuguese monolingual acquisition. Older age and a greater amount of formal instruction in the HL lead to better performance. The role of the amount of formal instruction varies based on the level of difficulty of the target structures. Cross-linguistic influence does not affect the results.