Towards modelling heritage speakers' sound systems

A roadmap for heritage language research

“…In the keynote, we painted a picture of HL competence using intentionally-broad brushstrokes, thereby allowing for generalizations across a wildly heterogenous population of speakers. Several commentators mentioned that washing out the variation inherent to heritage speakerhood could deprive us of explanatory power (see the commentaries by Embick, White & Tamminga, 2019; Gürel, 2019; Kupisch, 2019; Pearl, 2019; Flores & Rinke, 2019; Valian, 2019). The considerations are twofold.…”

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, 2011; Einfeldt 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).…”

“…Divergence from monolingual grammars is often interpreted as incomplete acquisition or acquisition without mastery (Montrul, 2002;Montrul & Bowles, 2009). While incomplete acquisition is a possible outcome in heritage grammars, this term has raised a lot of controversy in the literature (see Kupisch &Rothman, 2018 andDomínguez, Hicks &Slabakova, 2019 andcommentaries). As an attempt to redefine the construct, Pires and Rothman (2009) proposed a distinction between "true incomplete acquisition" and "missing-input competence divergence".…”

“…Compared to this, less research has been done in phonological domains, most likely given that positive effects of early exposure have been attested on heritage language pronunciation (Au, Knightly, Jun & Oh, 2002; Knightly, Jun, Oh & Au, 2003). Nevertheless, recent studies on heritage language phonology discuss the existence of a “heritage accent” (Au, Oh, Knightly, Jun & Romo, 2008; Lloyd-Smith, Einfeldt & Kupisch, 2020; Stangen, Kupisch, Proietti Ergün & Zielke, 2015) and found deviations from monolingual norms at both segmental (Amengual, 2012, 2016; Elias, McKinnon & Milla-Muñoz, 2017; Godson, 2004; Kissling, 2018; Ronquest, 2013; Willis, 2005) and suprasegmental levels (Chang, Yao, Haynes & Rhodes, 2011; Colantoni, Cuza & Mazzaro, 2016; Henriksen, 2016; Kim, 2019; Kim, 2020). For instance, Au et al (2008) found that Spanish heritage speakers, regardless of whether they regularly used Spanish during childhood, sounded more native-like than late L2 learners, but when compared with non-heritage native speakers, their speech was perceived to have a stronger foreign accent.…”

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

“…Other commentators observe crucial gaps in the keynote's overview of heritage language features. Muysken (2020) notes that the role of transfer in heritage languages has not been satisfactorily addressed in the keynote article, and Kupisch (2020) argues against the keynote note's claim that phonetics/phonology are robust in heritage languages by showing that these systems are affected as much as other aspects of language are in heritage speakers. Finally, two commentators take issue with the notion of ‘shrinking syntactic structure’ in heritage speakers.…”