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
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Standard Languages in the Context of Language Policy and Planning and Language Rights
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.