Heritage speakers—bilinguals who acquire minority languages naturalistically in infancy but are typically majority-language-dominant in adulthood—generally acquire grammars that differ systematically from the baseline input received in childhood. Yet not all areas diverge equally; understanding what characterizes divergence or resilience of a given feature is crucial to understanding heritage language acquisition. In this realm, we investigate the discourse-conditioned non-canonical word orders that mark information focus in Spanish. Focus bears the hallmarks of structures that diverge from the baseline, yet the evidence is mixed. We use an offline forced-choice task and an online self-paced reading task to compare heritage speakers’ judgments and processing to the baseline’s, and we find, echoing recent work, that the heritage speakers largely resemble baseline speakers. We interpret this convergence with reference to seven factors potentially affecting heritage language acquisition and identify one hypothesis—that focus facilitates processing due to its structural and pragmatic salience—as a promising explanation.

Bilingual children are a more heterogenous group than their monolingual counterparts with respect to the sources of variation in their language learning environments, as well as the wide individual variation in their language abilities. Such heterogeneity in both individual difference factors and language abilities argues for the importance of an individual differences approach in research on bilingual development. The main objective of this article is to provide a review and synthesis of research on the sources of individual differences in the second language (L2) and heritage language (HL) development of child bilinguals. Several child-internal and child-external individual difference factors are discussed with respect to their influence on children’s dual language abilities. In addition, the emergent research on individual differences in bilingual children with developmental language disorder is reviewed. Both the theoretical and applied relevance of individual difference approaches to bilingual development are discussed.

This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to elicit subject placement in wide focus and embedded interrogative contexts, where postverbal subjects are preferred/required in the monolingual variety. Results gave rise to two main conclusions: first, the parental input received by heritage children may be qualitatively different from the parental input received by monolingual children, in that it contains a higher rate of deviant preverbal subjects. Second, parental input quality in addition to quantity may affect the outcome of heritage language acquisition, in that children producing a higher rate of preverbal subjects had parents whose Greek input was not only quantitatively reduced, but also richer in preverbal subjects.

The primary objective of this paper is to investigate how early and late bilinguals attain implicit knowledge of Korean case drop that necessitates integration of multiple levels of information. An oral picture description task and a written forced-choice elicitation task were developed to investigate how different populations employ the relevant factors in Korean case drop and if certain types of cues are more accessible than others. The results reveal qualitative differences in the underlying linguistic knowledge of early vs. late bilinguals with early bilinguals achieving a higher level of mastery than late bilinguals in both oral and written tasks. The results underline the importance of age, context, and mode of acquisition and suggest that bilingual difficulty in the present phenomenon mainly arises from learners heavily relying on cues that are readily available to them in their respective context of acquisition and failing to effectively coordinate multiple constraints.

This study investigated the referring expressions used for first mentions of participants and entities in narratives by Mandarin heritage language (HL) and monolingual children. Referring expressions for first mentions in Mandarin comprise lexical, morphological and syntactic devices. Results showed that HL children used less adequate referring expressions for first mentions than the monolinguals, mainly due to overgeneralization of classifiers and lack of vocabulary knowledge. However, HL children did not differ from monolinguals in their use of relative clauses and post-verbal NP placement to mark first mentions. These results suggest that incomplete acquisition of the HL may vary across different linguistic subdomains (Montrul, 2008); specifically, domains requiring a great deal of input to acquire, such as vocabulary and the large repertoire of classifier morphemes, might be more vulnerable in HL speakers than syntax. Mixed modeling analyses revealed that older age of arrival, higher maternal education levels and a rich and diverse Mandarin environment at home predicted stronger narrative outcomes, also pointing to an important role for input in HL acquisition.