Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Abstract

Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.

Case marking is different in monolingual and heritage Bosnian in digitally elicited oral texts

“…The effect of HL input and use on the development of the HL in children has been shown to influence the speed and manner of acquisition across different linguistic domains such as vocabulary, morphosyntax and semantics (Thomas and Gathercole, 2005;Gathercole and Thomas, 2009;Paradis et al, 2011;La Morgia, 2015;Montrul, 2015;Unsworth, 2015Unsworth, , 2016Gagarina and Klassert, 2018;Kupisch, 2019;Czapka et al, 2021;Makrodimitris and Schulz, 2021). Variation in the quantity and quality of input as discussed above is considered by some the fundamental determinant of the interindividual variation observed in bilingual language acquisition (Paradis, 2011).…”

“…This effect of AoO was found in HL domains such as gender agreement ( Anderson, 1999 ) and aspectual contrasts in Spanish ( Montrul, 2002 ) as well as case inflection and expressive lexicon in Russian ( Gagarina and Klassert, 2018 ). However, some domains of HL grammar fail to show an effect from AoO: definiteness in Turkish ( Kupisch et al, 2016 ), sentential negation and wh-questions in Greek ( Makrodimitris and Schulz, 2021 ) and verb inflections in Russian ( Gagarina and Klassert, 2018 ).…”

“…The quantity of HL input is known to affect vocabulary size as well as diversity of produced morphemes: children receiving more input are reported to perform better than those with less input ( Gathercole and Thomas, 2009 ; Unsworth, 2015 , 2016 ; Czapka et al, 2021 ). Importantly, Gagarina and Klassert (2018) and Makrodimitris and Schulz (2021) report the use of the HL at home to be a significant predictor for the grammar domains under investigation in their respective studies. In their study of local and distant gender marking in Welsh with Welsh-English bilingual children, Thomas and Gathercole (2005) found the amount of input to influence speed of acquisition, especially with regards to the more complex and less transparent structures (such as possessive ei for masculine nouns in Welsh).…”

Age of Onset Effects in Child Bilingual Acquisition: Identifying the Turning Point

“…To investigate the effects of internal and external factors on language acquisition, sentence repetition tasks (SRT) are especially useful. Sentence repetition draws upon comprehension and production processes but is different from both production and comprehension tasks (Conti-Ramsden et al, 2001;Polišenská, 2011;Makrodimitris & Schulz, 2021). The results of SRT have been found to correlate with comprehension and production results (e.g., Ruigendijk & Friedmann, 2017), but SRT involves language processing at all levels of representation in both comprehension and production (e.g., Polišenská, 2011).…”

“…The results of SRT have been found to correlate with comprehension and production results (e.g., Ruigendijk & Friedmann, 2017), but SRT involves language processing at all levels of representation in both comprehension and production (e.g., Polišenská, 2011). Successful repetition requires children to be able to decode, reconstruct, and produce the sentence based on their own grammatical knowledge (e.g, Marinis & Armon-Lotem, 2015;Polišenská et al, 2015;Makrodimitris & Schulz, 2021). Sentence repetition is, thus, conceptual in nature and involves grammatical reconstruction.…”