Article In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism: Online-First Articles

Facilitative use of classifiers in heritage Vietnamese

ORCID logo | University of California San Diego
ORCID logo | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Recent research has highlighted the value of investigating the online language processing of heritage speakers (HS) as a means of accessing their implicit language knowledge (Montrul, 2023). While studies have shown that Spanish and Polish HS use grammatical gender cues to predict upcoming nouns (Fuchs, 2022a, 2022b), less is known about Vietnamese HS’ use of prenominal classifiers (e.g., con for animate objects, cái for inanimate objects) to facilitate their processing (but see Ito et al., 2024). This study examined if and how home-country raised and heritage speakers of Vietnamese in the U.S. use classifiers to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns, and whether heritage language proficiency is a modulating factor. Forty-one adult native speakers of Vietnamese (18 home-country raised, 23 HS) completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, an offline cloze test to assess knowledge of classifier–noun pairings, and a Vietnamese listening proficiency test. The results indicate that despite more variable knowledge of classifier–noun pairings and generally slower lexical access, HS use classifiers as a semantically informative cue during real-time comprehension, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent than their home-country raised peers. Increased proficiency in the heritage language, whether measured objectively or self-rated, was not found to enhance engagement in prediction.
Keywords: classifiers, Vietnamese, heritage, eye-tracking, listening proficiency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Processing of classifiers among adult L1 speakers
    • 2.2Processing of Classifiers in L2
    • 2.3Online processing of noun class information by heritage speakers
    • 2.4Classifiers in Vietnamese
  • 3.This study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
      • 3.2.1Language Background Questionnaire (LBQ)
      • 3.2.2Vietnamese Listening Proficiency Test (VLPT)
      • 3.2.3Visual-world experiment
      • 3.2.4Classifier–noun pairing test
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Classifier–noun pairing test
      • 4.1.1Typical nouns
      • 4.1.2Atypical nouns
    • 4.2Visual-world experiment
      • 4.2.1Mouse-click accuracy
      • 4.2.2Eye-gaze: Typical nouns
      • 4.2.3The role of proficiency
      • 4.2.4Eye gaze: Atypical nouns
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Limitations and future directions
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Data availability statement
  • Aknowledgements
  • Author queries
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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