A roadmap for heritage language research

Abstract

Our keynote, “Understanding heritage languages” (Polinsky & Scontras, 2019), and the commentaries to it make the following main points.

The missing link in Spanish heritage trill production

“…Thus, our data align with previous studies in heritage language phonology in that heritage speakers maintain the distinction in language-internal phonemic contrasts (Chang et al, 2009(Chang et al, , 2011Einfeldt et al, 2019;Lein et al, 2016). As suggested in Kupisch (2020), heritage speakers may maintain or even over-mark phonemic contrasts as a way to ease the overtaxing costs of one-to-more mappings in a situation in which more than one language competes for limited cognitive resources (i.e., avoidance of ambiguity in Polinsky & Scontras, 2020).…”

“…In order to account for the development of heritage speakers' divergent grammars, Polinsky and Scontras (2020) established three scenarios by comparing child heritage speakers (CHS), adult heritage speakers (AHS), and baseline first-generation immigrants (BASE). The first scenario occurs when a given linguistic property is present in the baseline, but it is used differently in both the adult and child heritage speakers (CHS = AHS ≠ BASE) (i.e., incomplete acquisition or divergent attainment).…”

“…Heritage speakers receive heritage language input mainly in colloquial registers and are rarely exposed to formal varieties. During the school years, heritage speakers become in frequent contact with the societal language and potentially shift their dominance from the heritage language to the societal language (Polinsky & Scontras, 2020;Stevens, 1992). Given these circumstances, heritage speakers are not a homogeneous group.…”

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

“…This issue of BLC comprises three special sections: (i) a keynote article on bilingual heritage speakers (Polinsky & Scontras, 2020a) plus 14 commentaries and an authors’ response to the commentaries (Polinsky & Scontras, 2020b), (ii) a review article (Höhle, Bijeljac-Babic & Nazzi, 2020) on bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition, and (iii) a themed section on the use of artificial language paradigms for bilingualism research (Weiss, 2020).…”

“…Putnam (2020) is also critical of the notion of shrinking structure and suggests instead distinguishing between grammatical features (e.g., case) and syntactic structures in heritage language grammars. In their response, Polinsky and Scontras (2020b) offer an in-depth discussion of the issues raised by the commentators. Taken together, this keynote article, the commentaries, and the authors’ response present a view of not only the affected (‘vulnerable’) aspects of the heritage grammar, but also of those ones which remain relatively stable and resistant to limited input and other potentially adverse elements of language learning under heritage conditions.…”