Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics
TLDR
The authors examine several important grammatical phenomena from the standpoint of their representation in heritage languages, including case, aspect, and other interface phenomena, and discuss how the questions raised by data from heritage speakers could fruitfully shed light on cur- rent debates about how language works and how it is acquired under different conditions.Abstract:
In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community re- cent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our understanding of the language faculty. Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in an envi- ronment where the native language is dominant in various contexts, and learners have extensive and continuous exposure to it and opportunities to use it. Heritage speakers present a different case: they are bilingual speakers of an ethnic or im- migrant minority language, whose first language often does not reach native-like attainment in adulthood. We propose a set of connections between heritage lan- guage studies and theory construction, underscoring the potential that this popu - lation offers for linguistic research. We examine several important grammatical phenomena from the standpoint of their representation in heritage languages, including case, aspect, and other interface phenomena. We discuss how the questions raised by data from heritage speakers could fruitfully shed light on cur - rent debates about how language works and how it is acquired under different conditions. We end with a consideration of the potential competing factors that shape a heritage language system in adulthood.read more
Citations
More filters
Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition
TL;DR: In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development, but two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language.
Journal ArticleDOI
Second language acquisition and universal grammar
TL;DR: L Lydia White has come out with a new textbook on Universal Grammar (UG) and SLA; buy it; end of story. Actually, I could justifiably end my review here as mentioned in this paper, but for those readers whose SLA research has been conducted on a different planet, let me pad things out a bit.
Book
The Acquisition of Heritage Languages
TL;DR: The acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics as discussed by the authors, focusing on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers.
Book
Heritage Languages and their Speakers
TL;DR: This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field, and offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages.
Journal ArticleDOI
Terminology matters! : Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers
Tanja Kupisch,Jason Rothman +1 more
TL;DR: The authors integrate research on child simultaneous bilingual (2L1) acquisition more directly into the heritage language acquisition literature and offer an epistemological discussion related to incomplete acquisition, highlighting the descriptive and theoretical inaccuracy of the term.
References
More filters
Book
The Minimalist Program
TL;DR: This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues Noam Chomsky's classic work The Minimalist Program with a new preface by the author, which emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory."
Book
Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use
TL;DR: The best available introduction to Chomsky's current ideas on syntax made accessible to the non-specialist can be found in this article, where Lightfoot, Newmeyer, and Moravcsik present an excellent contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
Book
Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition
TL;DR: The authors argue that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, which rests on the uniquely human ability to comprehend intention, and that children pick up these patterns in the buzz of words they hear around them.
Book
Variability in Early Communicative Development
TL;DR: Data from parent reports are used to describe the typical course and the extent of variability in major features of communicative development between 8 and 30 months of age, and unusually detailed information is offered on the course of development of individual lexical, gestural, and grammatical items and features.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life
Janet F. Werker,Richard C. Tees +1 more
TL;DR: This article showed that infants can discriminate non-native speech contrasts without relevant experience, and that there is a decline in this ability during ontogeny, which is a function of specific language experience.