Linguistic term paper

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Heritage Languages and Heritage Speakers

1. Definitions and distinctions § heritage language: socio-politically minority language, acquired as L1 during the first years

of life, in the case of sequential bilinguals, or simultaneously with the majority language since birth, in the case of simultaneous bilinguals

§ it has not been learned to its “full capacity” or has undergone attrition because of the switch to another dominant language

• Important distinctions i. Temporal dimension: First vs. Second => L1 is acquired earlier than L2 ii. Functional dimension: Primary vs. Secondary => primary language is the language that is predominantly spoken throughout the adult life iii. Sociopolitical dimension: Majority vs. Minority => majority language is typically the language spoken by an ethno- linguistically dominant group: standard, prestigious, has written variety used in government and the media, and it is the language imparted at school iv. Language Acquisition: Complete vs. Incomplete => A language may have been acquired completely, but undergone attrition as a result of “forgetting” the language. => Alternatively, a language may not have been completely acquired due to insufficient or interrupted input § Baseline: dialectal variety of the language the heritage speaker was exposed to. This may or

may not be the same as the “standard” variety. - the majority of Vietnamese speakers in Orange County speak the Southern dialect of Vietnamese; however, contemporary standard Vietnamese is based on the Northern dialect (Polinsky & Kagan 2007) o A quote: “A language qualifies as a heritage language if it is a language spoken at home or otherwise readily available to young children, and crucially this language is not a dominant language of the larger (national) society…… the heritage language is acquired on the basis of an interaction with naturalistic input and whatever in-born linguistic mechanisms are at play in any instance of child language acquisition. Differently [from monolingual acquisition], there is the possibility that quantitative and qualitative differences in heritage language input, influence of the societal majority language and differences in literacy and formal education can result in what on the surface seems to be arrested development of the heritage language or attrition in adult bilingual knowledge.” (Rothman, 2009:156)

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To summarize • A heritage language is typically acquired as an L1 • it fulfills a secondary role in the adult life • it is the minority language of the community • it was not completely acquired before the critical period OR • it developed completely but some aspects eroded later on 2. Identifying heritage speakers § Incomplete acquisition: grammatical aspects of the L1 that have not developed at the

appropriate level compared to monolingual age-matched peers § Heritage Speakers = 2nd generation immigrants (usually) § Many (though not all) also lack literacy in the heritage language - Studies show that literacy helps language development and, possibly, language retention (e.g. Cho & Krashen 2000, Oller & Eilers 2002; Bialystok et al. 2005; Delgado 2009). § Heritage speakers vary in their range of proficiency in their heritage language § Heritage speakers often offer an intriguing case of “reverse metalinguistic awareness”:

speakers who are quite fluent often assess their own knowledge as low, whereas those who are in fact low-level think they are quite good

o Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky (2010) - Participants: - Korean heritage-speaking subjects (N = 20). - Russian heritage-speaking subjects (N = 31). - Procedure: - Self-assessment of proficiency: Rate on a ‘Likert scale’ 1-5. - Objective assessment: Subjects were shown a video clip that they had to talk about. Their speech rate was calculated from their productions. - Results: - Correlation in Korean group, r = -.695. - Correlation in Russian group, r = -.82. - Dunning-Kruger Effect

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Figure 1: Correlations between self-assessment (1-5 scale) and speech rate (word/min), in Korean (left) and Russian heritage speakers (right). - Why? - the more a heritage speaker thinks about his/her L1, the more s/he is aware of his/her strengths and deficiencies -when asked to give grammaticality judgments, many HS often show self-doubt (Polinsky 2006; Polinsky & Kagan 2007) 3. Heritage grammatical system 3.1. Phonology and Phonetics § traditional accounts: heritage speakers sound completely native-like § However, native speakers are judged as non-native after a prolonged emigration (Au et al.

2002; Knightly et al. 2003; Major 1992; Schmid 2002; de Leeuw et al. 2010; Hopp & Schmid 2012)

o Oh, Jun, Knightly & Au (2003) - Participants: - All college students taking Korean language classes. - 12 native speakers - 15 childhood speakers: regularly spoke the language during early childhood. English became their primary language at around age 5 - 6 childhood hearers: English became their primary language at around age 5 - 10 novice learners: They had no exposure to Korean until college Korean classes - Procedure: - Phoneme perception task: Participants heard a word via headphones, saw a minimal triplet presented in Korean orthography (e.g. [tal], [t’al], [thal]), and were asked to indicate which word they heard - Phoneme production task: Participants asked to read sentences containing those same triplets they heard in the perception task

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- Accent rating: 8 additional Korean native speakers were asked to rate their pronunciation 1-5 (nonnative-native). - Results: - Phoneme perception task: novice learners were only ones who performed significantly worse than the native speakers - Phoneme production task: native and childhood speakers reliably contrasted all three pairs. Childhood hearers and novice learners did not for any of the pairs. - Accent rating: Childhood speakers, hearers, and novice learners all differed significantly from the native speakers - Discussion: - long-term benefits to being exposed to a language during childhood, even during early infancy (!!) as shown by studies of international adoptees (Oh, Au & Jun 2010) - but this is not enough to maintain a native-like accent o Godson (2004): phonetic changes in vowel production in Western Armenian heritage

speakers in the United States - heritage speakers retained the 5-vowel system of Western Armenian in production. - However, the two front vowels /i/ and /ε/ and the central vowel /a/ were not the same as for Western Armenian native speakers - The values for these vowels were closer to English values. => While heritage speakers retained their native phonology, the phonetic/acoustic values of both vowels and consonants were affected. Þ Thus, non-native accent may develop due to low use of a heritage language and prolonged

lack of exposure. 3.2. Lexicon § vocabulary can be highly affected in heritage language grammars

§ Hulsen (2000): lexical retrieval of nouns in production and comprehension in Dutch heritage

speakers in Australia - timed picture-naming and a picture-matching task - Second generation Dutch speakers differed significantly in both speed and accuracy of lexical retrieval from both first generation speakers and a control group (Dutch speakers in the Netherlands) - Third generation speakers managed to finish the picture-matching task (comprehension) but were unable to finish the picture-naming task (production).

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Þ Knowledge of lexical items can be indicator of grammatical competence.

§ Polinsky (1997, 2000, 2005, 2006): - strong correlation between a speaker’s knowledge of lexical items and the speaker’s control of grammatical phenomena such as agreement, case marking, aspect and tense marking, pro-drop, co-reference, and embedding

- The correlation is supported by results from several heritage languages, including Russian, Polish, Armenian, Korean, and Lithuanian. 3.3. Morphology § Inflectional morphology: sub-module of language most affected in heritage speakers

§ Issues in the nominal domain:

• Definiteness in Swedish and Hungarian (Håkansson 1995, Bolonyai 2007) • Case marking in Russian, Korean, and Polish (Polinsky 1997, 2006, 2008,

Song et al. 1997, Laskowski 2009). E.g. Heritage Russian speakers may use only 2 cases (nominative and accusative), instead of 6.

• Gender agreement in Russian, Spanish and Swedish (Håkansson 1995, Montrul, Foote & Perpiñán 2008, Polinsky 2008, Gupol 2009, Laleko 2010) o Montrul, Foote & Perpiñán (2008) - Subjects - 69 heritage speakers of Mexican descent who started attending American schools at 5 - 72 L2ers who began learning Spanish after puberty - 22 native speakers - Procedure - Cloze task-Noun: they were given a determiner, and 3 possible nouns to fill the noun space with, e.g. No quiero llevar las __ de ese color. (bufanda, maletas, pantalones) = ‘I don’t want to carry/wear the.f.pl __ of that color’ (scarf, suitcases, pants) - Cloze task- Det/Adj: they were given a noun and 2 possible determiners or adjectives, e.g. Las/Los llaves están en la puerta = ‘The.m.pl / the.f.pl keys are in the door’ - Oral picture description task using D + N + Adj - Results - Cloze task-Noun: Native speakers performed at ceiling, 99%, L2ers at 90%, and heritage speakers at 83% - Cloze task-Det/Adj: Native speakers performed very well overall, 97%, L2ers at

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91%, and heritage speakers at 85% (they did very well with Ds but poorly with Adjs). - Oral picture description task: Native speakers performed at 100%, L2ers at 72%, and heritage speakers at 92%. - Conclusion - Both the L2 learners and the heritage speakers had grammatical deficits with gender agreement. - BUT the root of the deficits might be different - L2ers more explicit knowledge and metalinguistic skills = Better performance in written tasks. - Heritage speakers have poorer metalinguistic skills but more implicit knowledge = Better performance in oral tasks. § Issues in the verbal domain are not as pronounced or pervasive, but have been reported for: • Agreement in Russian (Polinsky 1997, 2006) • Inflected infinitives in Brazilian Portuguese (Rothman 2007) • Mood in Spanish, Russian, and Hungarian (Montrul 2007, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Polinsky

1997, 2006, Fenyvesi 2000) • Aspect in Spanish and Hungarian (Montrul 2002, 2009, de Groot 2005)

3.4 Syntax § Syntax: more resilient to incomplete acquisition, particularly with respect to word order • Håkansson (1995): Swedish heritage speakers have native-speaker control of the V2

phenomenon • Montrul (2005): low proficiency Spanish heritage speakers have some knowledge of the

syntactic constraints on unaccusativity in their language: - post-verbal subjects are preferred with unaccusative verbs (e.g. arrive, leave) and dispreferred with unergative verbs (e.g. sing, speak). E.g. Llegó Juan, Juan cantó.

• Montrul, Foote & Perpiñán (2008): wh-movement, subject verb inversion and that-trace effects (see (2)) in Spanish heritage speakers through a grammaticality judgment task.

- It is possible to extract a subject from an embedded clause in Spanish (2a), but not English when that is overt (2b): (1) a. ¿Quiéni dijo Ana que besó Juan ti? (Object extraction) b. Whoi did Ana say that John kissed ti? (2) a. ¿Quiéni dijo Ana que ti rompió la taza? (Subject extraction) b. * Whoi did Ana say that ti broke the cup?

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- Both native Spanish speakers and heritage Spanish speakers judged both (1) and (b) to be grammatical. - However, heritage speakers tended to score both subject- and object wh-questions as intermediate, rather than completely grammatical - On the other hand, even the advanced L2ers judged the subject-extracted wh-questions to be worse than the object-extracted ones § less robust areas of heritage grammars that seem to be consistently affected: • Null pronouns: Heritage languages whose baseline is pro-drop are reported to lose the pro-

drop feature or to use it in a more limited manner: Hungarian (de Grot 2005), Hindi (Mahajan 2009), Korean (Choi 2003), Spanish (Silva-Corvalán 1994, Montrul 2004), Polish (Brehmer & Czachor 2010)

• Sorace (2004) and Sorace & Serratrice (2009) attribute this to the attrition of phenomena that lie at the Interfaces (e.g. syntax-discourse)

• According to Benmamoun, Montrul, and Polinsky (2010) an alternative explanation for the loss of pro-drop: heritage speakers have a general difficulty in establishing syntactic dependencies, especially when the dependency is at a distance

• Long-distance dependencies such as A’-movement (e.g. relative clauses, wh-questions) and A-movement (e.g. passives, raising): vulnerable domains

o Polinsky (2009) - investigated word order and passive constructions in English-dominant heritage speakers of Russian and age-matched monolingual Russian controls. - Subjects matched pictures to active/passive constructions, with verb-initial and verb-medial orders in Russian: (3) a. morjak spas pirat-a (Active SVO) sailor.NOM saved pirate-ACC b. spas pirat-a morjak (Active VOS) saved pirate-ACC sailor.NOM c. spas morjak pirat-a (Active VSO) saved sailor.NOM pirate-ACC ‘The sailor saved the pirate.’ (4) a. pirat spas-en morjak-om (Passive SVO) pirate.NOM saved-PASS sailor-INSTR b. spasen morjak-om pirat (Passive VOS) saved-PASS sailor-INSTR pirate.NOM c. spasen pirat morjak-om (Passive VSO)

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saved-PASS pirate.NOM sailor-INSTR ‘The pirate was saved by the sailor.’

Þ heritage speakers have serious problems when the word-order is different from Agent-

Verb-Patient, even for active constructions. Þ These results parallel the results obtained for child language and aphasics

3.5. Semantics § certain aspects of semantics may be highly affected in heritage grammars

• Animacy (Differential Object Marking)

- Spanish has Differential Object Marking (DOM) with animate specific direct objects (5), an instance of inherent case.

o Silva-Corvalán (1994) and Montrul (2002) (a.o.): Spanish heritage speakers tend to omit this

case marker, which happens to be the preposition a - the preposition a, which is also the dative marker (6), is not omitted with indirect objects. - inherent case marking may be more affected than structural case marking (5) a. Pedro besó *(a) María. Peter kissed to Mary ‘Peter kissed Mary.’ b. Pedro besó (*a) la mano de María Peter kissed to the hand of Mary ‘Peter kissed Mary’s hand.’ (6) Pedro dió un beso a María. Peter gave a kiss to Mary ‘Peter gave a kiss to Mary.’ • Generic determiners:

o Montrul & Ionin (2010): Spanish heritage speakers have strong tendency to use bare

nouns with generic reference in subject position (which are ungrammatical in Spanish but grammatical in English; (7)),

o they tend to interpret definite articles in Spanish as specific in generic contexts

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(7) Los perros tienen colas the dogs have tails ‘Dogs have tails’ (generic) (OR ‘The dogs have tails’ [specific]) 4. What shapes heritage grammars? 4.1. Incomplete acquisition § Heritage speakers get frozen or fossilized at the incomplete acquisition stage § common pattern: child begins socialization in the majority language, the amount of input and

use in the minority language is reduced § child’s competence in the heritage language begins to fade § These delays never eventually catch up § indication of incomplete acquisition: a given language feature causes problems equally to

adult heritage speakers and to child learners at the age of 5 and up § example: acquisition of the subjunctive in Spanish, not completely acquired until

approximately age 10 (Blake 1983).

Þ Heritage speakers who receive less input at an earlier age and no scholastic education in the language never fully acquire the subjunctive in Spanish (Martínez Mira 2009, Montrul 2007, Potowski et al. 2009, Silva-Corvalán 1994).

4.2. Attrition § Attrition: a grammatical system had a chance to develop completely and remained stable for

a while before some grammatical aspects eroded later on § test attrition: longitudinal data § in the absence of longitudinal data, generalizations can be built on the research on

first/bilingual language acquisition § example of attrition: comprehension of relative clauses (generally acquired around age 4; de

Villiers et al. 1979; Goodluck et al. 2006; Guasti & Cardinaletti 2003, a.o.) o Polinsky (2011) • she compared the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in heritage Russian

adults and children • Hypotheses:

- Incomplete acquisition: If a child and an adult deviate from the baseline in the same way, it can be assumed that the feature has not been acquired - Attrition: if a child performs as her age-matched baseline control but the adult does not, the feature can be assumed to have been acquired but may have subsequently been lost or reanalyzed. - Participants:

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- 15 monolingual children, mean age 6.6 - 26 monolingual adults - 21 heritage children, mean age 6.2 - 29 heritage adults - Procedure and materials: - 36 pairs of pictures that described reversible actions - For each pair, subjects heard a question with a subject relative clause (8) or object relative clause (9) - same surface word order of English (8a) and (9a), or with scrambled S/O, (8b) (could be incorrectly interpreted as Object Relative Clause) and (9b) (could be incorrectly interpreted as Subject Relative Clause) (8) a. Gde koška [ kotor-aja dogonjaet sobak-u ] ? (Subject RelCl S-VO) where cat REL-NOM catching.up dog-ACC ‘Where is the cat that is chasing the dog?’ b. Gde koška [ kotor-aja sobak-u dogonjaet ] ? (Subject RelCl S-OV) where cat REL-NOM dog-ACC catching.up ‘Where is the cat that is chasing the dog?’ (9) a. Gde sobaka [ kotoruju koška dogonjaet ] ? (Object RelCl O-SV) where dog REL-ACC cat.NOM catching.up ‘Where is the dog that the cat is chasing?’ b. Gde sobaka [ kotoruju dogonjaet koška ] ? (Object RelCl O-VS) where dog REL-ACC catching.up cat.NOM ‘Where is the dog that the cat is chasing?’ - Results: - Heritage children performed almost at ceiling in all 4 conditions - Heritage adult speakers performed at chance on object relatives and showed a degraded performance on subject relatives. => the grammar of relative clauses underwent attrition in the language of heritage adults - the experimental conditions were structured in such a way that transfer from English was ruled out. - reduced (attrited) adult system reflects well on the seemingly universal preference for subject relatives

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Figure 2: a. Child monolingual, b. Adult monolingual, c. Child heritage speaker, d. Adult heritage speaker 4.3. Dominant language transfer § the second language can encroach into the structure of the native language in systematic

ways (Cook 2003, Pavlenko & Jarvis 2002, Seliger 1996). § nominal and verbal inflectional morphology in Spanish and Russian heritage speakers is

eroded because the contact language in most of the heritage speakers tested to date is English, a poorly inflected language

Þ Question: How can we distinguish them?

o J.-H. Kim (2007): binding interpretations by Korean heritage speakers in the United States and Korean heritage speakers in China

- tested knowledge of binding interpretations with local and long-distance anaphors in different syntactic contexts (caki, an anaphor that allows local and non-local antecedents, with a preference for non-local) - Korean heritage speakers in China were expected to be more accurate with long distance binding than the Korean heritage speakers in the United States due to similar anaphoric elements present in Mandarin (ziji), but not in English - the two groups of Korean speakers still had a marked preference for local binding, regardless of the contact language (like Korean-speaking children!) Þ Why study heritage language speakers? “Heritage speakers straddle the boundaries between first and second language acquisition, which makes them extremely valuable in testing fundamental questions about the … correlation between age of acquisition and linguistic competence, the nature and role of input that contribute or not to native-like competence, and the interplay between the heritage language and the dominant

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language. In other words, by studying this language group … we can begin to determine what it means to be a native speaker and what conditions are needed to develop the competence that characterizes one.” (Benmamoun, Monstrul & Polinsky 2012) Assigned (**) and suggested (*) readings ** Hummel, K. 2014. Introducing second language acquisition. Chichester, England: Wiley Blackwell. Chapter 4 (‘Theoretical perspectives: past and present’). * MacSwan, J. (2017). A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging. American Educational Research Journal 54(1): 167–201. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831216683935

* Wei, L. (2018). Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics 39(1): 9-30. https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/39/1/9/4566103