Attrition and Reactivation of a Childhood Language: The Case of Returnee Heritage Speakers

Abstract

This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of nominal inflection, indicating that the speakers’ morphological knowledge had not been sufficiently stabilized due to the return. The second dataset is from one returnee HS who was reimmersed in the German environment after a 4‐year stay in Portugal. The comparative analysis of the speaker's performance 13 months after moving away from Germany and 11 months after being reexposed to German revealed a significant decrease of inaccurate case, gender, and plural marking, which supports the hypothesis of restabilization of linguistic knowledge. Overall, the findings emphasize the effects of lack of exposure on the development of HSs’ bilingual competence.

Redefining Language Death: Evidence From Moribund Grammars

“…We argue that functionally communicative moribund HLs contribute to our greater understanding of grammatical change, as they represent contact grammars that are both strikingly resilient, and structurally innovative in complex ways. These data also provide insight into the mechanisms of maintenance of minority grammars in language contact settings, such as the grammars of returnees (see Flores, ). As contact varieties experiencing unequal exchange, heritage languages shed light both on the resiliency of a communicatively functional grammar over the lifespan of a speaker, and also on the ways in which grammars may be restructured in multilingual settings, given drastic constraints on the social domains and frequency of use over time.…”

The Roles of Age, Attitude, and Use in First Language Development and Attrition of Turkish–English Bilinguals

“…This finding may suggest that younger speakers may be more sensitive to input and exposure factors, and that this sensitivity accounts for the larger range of variability with respect to proficiency often found among bilinguals with a lower AaO. This would suggest that the native language of monolinguals goes through a process of relative stabilization around puberty and, after that, becomes largely impervious to attrition regardless of how much input and output is experienced (this suggestion has been made by, e.g., Bylund, 2009;Flores, 2019;Montrul, 2008;Schmid, 2013). On the other hand, as pointed out above, there is the possibility of a causality reversal, indicating that those speakers who, for whichever reason, had retained a high level of Turkish proficiency into adulthood were more comfortable with using it and therefore had higher levels of use.…”

“…Furthermore, language learning aptitude is correlated with L1 skill for younger populations, but no such correlation has been found among postpuberty bilinguals (Bylund, Abrahamsson, & Hyltenstam, ; Bylund & Ramírez‐Galan, ). Such observations have led to speculations that, once grammatical structures have been acquired in early childhood, an extended period of rich exposure and use (characterized by input from a range of sources and ideally in various modalities and styles) may be necessary in order to ensure their entrenchment and render them impervious to attrition (Flores, ; Polinsky & Scontras, in press; Schmid & Köpke, ). This factor seems to be what sets HSs apart: even if they have experienced the necessary rich and diverse input in childhood, the language balance often shifts toward the language of the environment once they start school, causing them to miss out on this consolidation period.…”

Case Marking Variation in Heritage Slavic Languages in Toronto: Not So Different

“…Case has been claimed as a vulnerable area of grammar for heritage speakers (de Groot, 2005;Flores, 2019;Leisio, 2006;Montrul & Bowles, 2009;Polinsky, 2018), meaning that it is more likely than other parts of languages to change when the language exists in a minority language context (cf. Bousquette & Putnam, 2019).…”