This study investigates restructuring in heritage language (HL) grammars with a special focus on the driving forces behind
changes in the underlying grammar. We evaluate the effect of Age of Onset of bilingualism (AoO) on possible grammatical restructuring.
Relatedly, we assess whether HL grammar divergence from the baseline can be attributed to the Age of Acquisition of a particular linguistic
phenomenon and/or to the structural properties of the dominant language, under transfer.
With these general questions in mind, we conducted an auditory acceptability judgement task evaluating sensitivity to form
(mis)matches in adjective-noun and numeral-noun expressions in adult Russian-Hebrew speakers: HL-speakers with AoO before age 5, HL-speakers
with AoO between 5–13, and the Russian-dominant bilinguals.
The results demonstrate a robust effect of AoO: HL speakers with earlier AoO are less accurate in detecting
ungrammaticalities across the board. We argue that similarities in the structures in the heritage and dominant language allow HL speakers to
maintain properties of monolingual grammars; dissimilarities, on the other hand, may lead to reanalysis in the HL grammar. However, the
newly-built representations in the HL do not match those of the dominant language, suggesting that changed representations do not result
from direct transfer.
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Cited by (20)
Cited by 20 other publications
Fridman, Clara, Maria Polinsky & Natalia Meir
2024. Cross-linguistic influence meets diminished input: A comparative study of heritage Russian in contact with Hebrew and English. Second Language Research 40:3 ► pp. 675 ff.
2024. A Corpus-Based Study on Orthographic Errors of Russian Heritage Learners and Their Implications for Linguistic Research and Language Teaching. Languages 9:4 ► pp. 126 ff.
Laleko, Oksana
2024. Heritage Language Forms. In The Cambridge Handbook of Slavic Linguistics, ► pp. 657 ff.
Meir, Natalia & Maria Polinsky
2024. One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Once I Caught a Fish Alive: Numerical Phrases in Child and Adult Heritage Russian. Languages 9:8 ► pp. 261 ff.
Vorobyeva, Tamara, Aurora Bel & Maria Voeikova
2024. Grammatical gender agreement in production: The case of heritage Russian. International Journal of Bilingualism 28:2 ► pp. 234 ff.
2023. Narrative microstructure and macrostructure skills in Arabic diglossia: The case of Arab immigrant children in Canada. International Journal of Bilingualism 27:3 ► pp. 349 ff.
2022. Self-Repair in Elicited Narrative Production in Speakers of Russian as the First (L1), Second (L2), and Heritage (HL) Language. Languages 7:3 ► pp. 229 ff.
Perez-Cortes, Silvia
2022. ON COMPLEXITY AND DIVERGENCE IN HERITAGE LANGUAGE GRAMMARS. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 44:3 ► pp. 818 ff.
AKKUŞ, Mehmet, Çiğdem SAĞIN ŞİMŞEK & Albert M. BACKUS
2021. Investigating Contact-induced Change in Heritage Turkish: A Study on the Use of Temporal -DIK Converbial Constructions. Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 15:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
Antonova-Unlu, Elena, Li Wei & Didem Kaya-Soykan
2021. Interfaces in the returnees’ heritage language: Is the complete (re-)activation possible?. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:6 ► pp. 1764 ff.
Ionin, Tania
2021. Semantics of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 668 ff.
Meir, Natalia & Bibi Janssen
2021. Child Heritage Language Development: An Interplay Between Cross-Linguistic Influence and Language-External Factors. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Meir, Natalia, Susan Joffe, Ronald Shabtaev, Joel Walters & Sharon Armon-Lotem
2021. Heritage Languages in Israel. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 129 ff.
Polinsky, Maria & Gregory Scontras
2020. A roadmap for heritage language research. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23:1 ► pp. 50 ff.
Turan, Dilek, Elena Antonova-Ünlü, Çiğdem Sağın-Şimşek & Mehmet Akkuş
2020. Looking for contact-induced language change: Converbs in heritage Turkish. International Journal of Bilingualism 24:5-6 ► pp. 1035 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Grammatical Aspects of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 579 ff.
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