Research on multilingual speakers is often compared to monolingual baselines which are commonly treated as if they were homogeneous across speakers. Despite recent research showing that this homogeneity does not hold, these practices reproduce native-speakerism and monolingualism. Heritage language research, which established itself in the past two decades, is no exemption. Focusing on three predefined linguistic groups, namely Turkish speakers which are framed as monolingual in Turkey as well as two heritage bilingually framed groups in Germany and the USA, we ask: (1) Do heritage speakers of Turkish produce more discourse and fluency markers (FMs) than monolingual speakers? (2) Are the groups homogeneous, or is there wide variation between speakers across groups? We focus on the variation between and within groups using Bayesian Linear Regression with a multilevel model for speakers and heritage groups. Our findings confirm that the use of discourse and FMs is largely defined through individual variation, and not through the belonging to a certain speaker group. By focusing on variation across groups rather than between groups, our study design supports the growing body of literature that questions common heritage language research practices of today and shows alternative paths to understanding heritage grammars.

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.

The present study investigated lexical production and innovation of 202 participants across six groups: child and adult heritage speakers of Russian, dominant in Hebrew or American English, and monolingual Russian-speaking children and adults. Understanding quantitative performance across these six groups was intended to provide a comprehensive perspective on heritage language (HL) development, while comparing the participants’ qualitative non-target response patterns would elucidate the organization of the HL lexicon. We assessed the production of Russian nouns and verbs using a naming task. We then considered the effects of input at the societal and lexical levels (focusing on word frequency and age of acquisition). Our findings are discussed in terms of accounts of HL developmental trajectories: monolingual-like trajectory, frozen lexical development, attrition, and new language variety in a contact situation. The results presented no evidence for attrition, while elements of the other three trajectories were found in our quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the study of heritage language bilinguals. However, much of the research on heritage bilingualism is fraught with deficit framing. In this article, we demonstrate how many of the assumptions that underlie this growing field of research and the way that heritage speakers are positioned as research subjects reveal ideologies that center and value monolingualism and whiteness. We problematize a number of ways in which these ideologies commonly show up in the frameworks and methodologies used in psycholinguistics to study this population. We advocate for frameworks such as usage-based linguistics and multicompetence that center the multidimensional experiences of bilinguals and embrace nuance and complexity. We call on the research community to examine their research designs and theories to dismantle the systems that maintain heritage bilingualism at the margins of bilingualism research.

Cross-linguistic structural priming effects suggest that bilinguals have shared or connected memory representations for similar syntactic structures. This predicts an influence of the production preferences of one language in the other language (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2018). We hypothesized that shared structures will lead to a facilitatory effect on production frequencies, whereas connected structures may sometimes lead to an inhibitory effect due to competition between structures. We compared the production preferences and priming effects in Dutch for the frequent by-phrase-final and the uncommon by-phrase-medial passive between Arabic/Berber–Dutch and Turkish–Dutch heritage speakers and native speakers of Dutch. Arabic/Berber–Dutch speakers produced more agentless passives –that is, the alternative shared between their two languages. In contrast, Turkish–Dutch speakers produced less by-phrase-medial passives, although these are less uncommon in Turkish. This inhibition effect suggests that syntactic structures may sometimes be connected rather than shared, although the exact mechanisms behind the inhibitory effects require further research.

Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilingualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolinguals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: meet the standards of empirical control in line with the scientific method. Instead, the default nature of monolingual comparative normativity has historically contributed to inequalities in many facets of bilingualism research and continues to impede progress on multiple levels. Beyond framing our views on the matter, we offer some epistemological considerations and methodological alternatives to this standard practice that improve empirical rigor while fostering increased diversity, inclusivity, and equity in our field.

This study investigated the unresolved issue of potential sources of heritage language attrition. To test contributing effects of three learner variables – age of second language acquisition, length of residence, and language input – on heritage children's lexical retrieval accuracy and speed, we conducted a real-time word naming task with 68 children (age 11–14 years) living in South Korea who spoke either Chinese or Russian as a heritage language. Results of regression analyses showed that the participants were less accurate and slower in naming target words in their heritage language as their length of residence in Korea and the amount of Korean input increased. The age of Korean acquisition did not significantly influence their performance. These findings support the claim that heritage speakers’ language experience is a more reliable predictor of first language attrition than age of acquisition. We discuss these findings in light of different approaches to explaining language attrition.

The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and the case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate the relative vulnerability of both domains at once. Our results show that while the prepositional inventory of NAmIce is not reduced as compared to Modern Icelandic, the choice of prepositions is subject to crosslinguistic influence from the dominant language English. For case, we find an increase in the use of nominative and accusative case at the expense of the dative; prepositions may take over case functions too. Our results are in line with previous research on case in heritage languages as well as studies on language change, while partially contradicting the assumption that loss is reversely related to acquisition.

This article examines the performance of heritage speakers (HSs) on two types of acceptability judgment tasks (AJTs) as well as their corresponding confidence ratings. Data were collected from 75 native speakers of Spanish who were subsequently divided into three groups: Spanish monolinguals, Spanish-dominant HSs, and English-dominant HSs. An AJT targeting morphosyntax (Task 1) showed that all groups were affected by task stimulus, that is, they were significantly less accurate on the ungrammatical items. A lexically focused AJT (Task 2) revealed the tendency of HSs to accept complex words that are possible yet not attested. Confidence ratings on both tasks were very high overall, and there was a significant relationship between accuracy and confidence. Thus, the data question the assumption made in a number of previous studies that HSs suffer from a lack of certainty in their linguistic intuitions. Finally, between-group effects show that the Spanish-dominant HS group was not different from the monolingual group on Task 1, yet there were significant differences between all three groups on Task 2. By comparing morphosyntactic and lexical phenomena on two tasks administered in the same modality, this research contributes to the discussion of vulnerable domains in heritage language bilingualism.

This study investigates Spanish heritage speakers' perception and production of Spanish lexical stress. Stress minimal pairs in various prosodic contexts were used to examine whether heritage speakers successfully identify the stress location despite varying suprasegmental cues (Experiment 1) and whether they use these cues in their production (Experiment 2). Heritage speakers' performance was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals and English L2 learners. In Experiment 1, the heritage speakers showed a clear advantage over the L2 learners and their performance was comparable to that of the monolinguals. In Experiment 2, both the heritage speakers and the L2 learners showed deviating patterns from the monolinguals; they produced a large overlap between paroxytones and oxytones, especially in duration. The discrepancy between heritage speakers' perception and production suggests that, while early exposure to heritage language is beneficial for the perception of heritage language speech sounds, this factor alone does not guarantee target-like production.

This Special Issue (SI) is dedicated to early bilinguals, who acquire two languages during early childhood, before age 6, simultaneously (2L1 bilinguals) or sequentially (cL2 bilinguals). Recently, the notion of heritage speakers (HSs) − bilinguals who grow up speaking a minority language at home − has become prominent in this context. HS research has typically targeted bilinguals at a mature (adult) state, but early developing bilinguals may of course be HSs too, though not uniformly labelled as such. HSs of a moribund language or variety are another type of early bilingual, representing the final or penultimate, often 4th or 5th, generation of speakers. Unfortunately, ‘deficiency’ or ‘incompleteness’ is a common thread linking much HS research − despite a wealth of evidence demonstrating HSs’ maintenance of complexity in many grammatical domains along with differences to monolinguals (see, e.g., Kupisch & Rothman, 2016; Putnam & Sánchez, 2013). This SI brings together studies on how and why the morphosyntax and phonology of early bilinguals might differ from that of monolinguals.