Language loss in bilingual Chicano children

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

“…The first strategy consists of conducting longitudinal or semi-longitudinal studies of children like the ones by Anderson (1999), Merino (1983) and Silva-Corvalán Meanwhile, the adult heritage speakers had significant problems with relative clauses as compared with the other three groups. This is an indication of attrition over the lifespan.…”

Defining an “ideal” heritage speaker: Theoretical and methodological challenges Reply to peer commentaries

“…There are at least three shorter-term longitudinal studies of Spanish heritage speakers in the United States that we know of, which clearly show that it is possible to document both attrition and incomplete acquisition in these speakers even during childhood. Merino (1983) presents a study of school-age Latino children in California. The children were tested on production and comprehension of early-and late-acquired morphosyntactic properties of Spanish (tense, agreement, gender, subjunctive, relative clause, conditionals).…”

Some Properties of Bilingual Maintenance and Loss in Mexican Background High-School Students

“…It is an age period when sufficient opportunity for the development of both languages has occurred (except for those most recent arrivals), such that the level of bilingualism attained can be considered to have reached some state of stability. There is mounting evidence of ongoing interaction between the two languages in younger bilinguals (for example, Merino 1983 who assessed bilingual proficiency in kindergarten through fourth graders; Brewer Bomar 198 1, who studied lexical and syntactical interference in four-year-olds; and Kaufman and Aronoff in press, who studied the verbal system in a two-year old), but by adolescence, it is assumed that this process would have stabilized. At this period,furthermore, most subjects still live at home, and they are subject to the influences of the home language environment, a variable that has been determined to be important in Veltman's analysis.…”