Hostname: page-component-76c49bb84f-qtd2s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-11T12:19:57.311Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Understanding heritage languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

Maria Polinsky  and
Gregory Scontras
Maria Polinsky*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, Department of Linguistics
Gregory Scontras
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine, Department of Language Science
*
Address for correspondence: Maria Polinsky, E-mail: polinsky@umd.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

With a growing interest in heritage languages from researchers of bilingualism and linguistic theory, the field of heritage-language studies has begun to build on its empirical foundations, moving toward a deeper understanding of the nature of language competence under unbalanced bilingualism. In furtherance of this trend, the current work synthesizes pertinent empirical observations and theoretical claims about vulnerable and robust areas of heritage language competence into early steps toward a model of heritage-language grammar. We highlight two key triggers for deviation from the relevant baseline: the quantity and quality of the input from which the heritage grammar is acquired, and the economy of online resources when operating in a less dominant language. In response to these triggers, we identify three outcomes of deviation in the heritage grammar: an avoidance of ambiguity, a resistance to irregularity, and a shrinking of structure. While we are still a ways away from a level of understanding that allows us to predict those aspects of heritage grammar that will be robust and those that will deviate from the relevant baselines, our hope is that the current work will spur the continued development of a predictive model of heritage language competence.

Keywords

heritage languagesunbalanced bilingualismcompetenceinputstructural reorganizationattritiondivergence

Information

Type
Keynote Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 4 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Albirini, AE, Benmamoun, E and Saadah, E (2011) Grammatical features of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers’ oral production. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33, 273–303.Google Scholar
Anderson, R (1999) Noun phrase gender agreement in language attrition: Preliminary results. Bilingual Research Journal 23, 318–337.Google Scholar
Antón-Méndez, I, Nicol, JL and Garrett, MF (2002) The relation between gender and number agreement processing. Syntax 5, 1–25.Google Scholar
Aoun, J and Li, Y-HA (1989) Constituency and scope. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 141–172.Google Scholar
Arnold, JE, Eisenband, JG, Brown-Schmidt, S and Trueswell, JC (2000) The rapid use of gender information: Evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eyetracking. Cognition 76, B13–B26.Google Scholar
Arslan, S, Bastiaanse, R and Felser, C (2015) Looking at the evidence in visual world: Eye-movements reveal how bilingual and monolingual Turkish speakers process grammatical evidentiality. Frontiers in Psychology 6 (1387).Google Scholar
Austin, J (2007) Grammatical interference and the acquisition of ergative case in bilingual children learning Basque and Spanish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10, 315–331.Google Scholar
Austin, J (2009) Delay, interference and bilingual development: The acquisition of verbal morphology in children learning Basque and Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism 13, 447–479.Google Scholar
Benmamoun, E, Montrul, S and Polinsky, M (2013a) Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics 39, 129–181.Google Scholar
Benmamoun, E, Montrul, S and Polinsky, M (2013b) Defining an “ideal” heritage speaker: Theoretical and methodological challenges. Reply to peer commentaries. Theoretical Linguistics 39, 259–294.Google Scholar
Berent, GP, Kelly, RR and Schueler-Choukairi, T (2009) Economy in the acquisition of English universal quantifier sentences: The interpretations of deaf and hearing students and second language learners at the college level. Applied Psycholinguistics 30, 251–290.Google Scholar
Bronkhorst, AW (2000) The Cocktail Party phenomenon: A review on speech intelligibility in multiple-talker conditions. Acta Acustica united with Acustica 86, 117–128.Google Scholar
Brooks, PJ and Braine, MDS (1996) What do children know about the universal quantifiers ‘all’ and ‘each’? Cognition 60, 235–268.Google Scholar
Bruno, JV (2011) Absolute constructions: Telicity, abstract Case, and micro-variation. In Ortiz-López, LA (ed.), Selected Proceedings of the 13th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, pp. 264–274.Google Scholar
Büring, D (2003) On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26, 511–545.Google Scholar
Bylund, E (2009) Maturational constraints and first language attrition. Language Learning 59, 687–715.Google Scholar
Carminati, MN (2002) The processing of Italian subject pronouns. Ph. D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Google Scholar
Carminati, MN (2005) Processing reflexes of the Feature Hierarchy (person > number > gender) and implications for linguistic theory. Lingua 115, 259–285.+number+>+gender)+and+implications+for+linguistic+theory.+Lingua+115,+259–285.>Google Scholar
Carpini, MD (2003) Developmental stages in the semantic acquisition of quantification by adult L2 learners of English: A pilot study. In Liceras, JM, Zobl, H and Goodluck, H (eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition conference (GASLA 2002): L2 Links. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 55–63.Google Scholar
Carstens, V (2000) Concord in minimalist theory. Linguistic Inquiry 31, 319–355.Google Scholar
Choi, K-I and Kim, Y-J (2007) Caykwitaymyengsa-uy tauyseng hayso-kwaceng: Ankwu-wuntong pwunsek [Ambiguity resolution processes of reflexives: Eye-tracking data]. Korean Journal of Experimental Psychology 19, 263–277.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N (1965) Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Christianson, K, Hollingworth, A, Halliwell, JF and Ferreira, F (2001) Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology 42, 368–407.Google Scholar
Crain, S, Thornton, R, Boster, C, Conway, L, Lillo-Martin, D and Woodams, E (1996) Quantification without qualification. Language Acquisition 5, 83–153.Google Scholar
Cuza, A (2016) The status of interrogative subject-verb inversion in Spanish-English bilingual children. Lingua 180, 124–138.Google Scholar
Cuza, A and Frank, J (2015) On the role of experience and age-related effects: Evidence from the Spanish CP. Second Language Research 31, 3–28.Google Scholar
Cuza, A and Pérez-Tattam, R (2016) Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19, 50–68.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A (1990) The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
de Prada Pérez, A (2009) Subject expression in Minorcan Spanish: Consequences of contact with Catalan. Ph. D. thesis, Pennsylvania State University.Google Scholar
Deen, KU (2005) The acquisition of Swahili. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Dubinina, I and Polinsky, M (2013) Russian in the USA. In Moser, M and Polinsky, M (eds.), Slavic languages in migration. Vienna: University of Vienna, pp. 131–160.Google Scholar
Duffield, N (2018) Reflections on psycholinguistic theories. Raiding the inarticulate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ferreira, F and Henderson, JM (1991) Recovery from misanalyses of garden-path sentences. Journal of Memory and Language 25, 725–745.Google Scholar
Flores, C (2010) The effect of age on language attrition: Evidence from bilingual returnees. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13, 533–546.Google Scholar
Flores, C (2012) Differential effects of language attrition in the domains of verb placement and object expression. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15, 550–567.Google Scholar
Flores, C (2017) Problematizing the scope of language attrition from the perspective of bilingual returnees. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7, 691–695.Google Scholar
Frazier, L and Rayner, K (1982) Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology 14, 178–210.Google Scholar
Fuchs, Z, Polinsky, M and Scontras, G (2015) The differential representation of number and gender in Spanish. The Linguistic Review 32, 703–737.Google Scholar
Gathercole, VCM (2007) Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: Constructivist account of morpho-syntactic development in bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10, 224–247.Google Scholar
Gathercole, VCM and Thomas, EM (2007) Factors contributing to language transmission in bilingual families: The core study – adult interviews. In Gathercole, VCM (ed.), Language transmission in bilingual families in Wales. Cardiff: Welsh Language Board, pp. 59–181.Google Scholar
Gibson, E (1998) Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68, 1–76.Google Scholar
Goldberg, L (2005) Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis: A cross-linguistic study. Ph. D. thesis, McGill University.Google Scholar
Gollan, TH, Starr, J and Ferreira, VS (2015) More than use it or lose it: The number-of-speakers effect on heritage language proficiency. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 22, 147–155.Google Scholar
Gribanova, V (2013) Verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis and the structure of the Russian verbal complex. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 31, 91–136.Google Scholar
Grodner, D and Gibson, E (2005) Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input for sentential complexity. Cognitive Science 29, 261–290.Google Scholar
Grosjean, F (2010) Bilingual: Life and reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hale, J (2001) A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of the second meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Pittsburgh, PA. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 159–166.Google Scholar
Harizanov, B (2014) Clitic doubling at the syntax-morphophonology interface: A-movement and morphological merger in Bulgarian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 32, 593–634.Google Scholar
Harley, H and Ritter, E (2002) Person and number in pronouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language 78, 482–526.Google Scholar
Hawkins, JA (1999) Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars. Language 75, 244–285.Google Scholar
Hawkins, JA (2003) Efficiency and complexity in grammars: Three general principles. In Moore, J and Polinsky, M (eds.), The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 121–152.Google Scholar
Henderson, BM (2006) The syntax and typology of Bantu relative clauses. Ph. D. thesis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Hernanz, ML (1991) Spanish absolute constructions and aspect. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 1, 75–128.Google Scholar
Heycock, C (2008) Japanese WA, GA, and information structure. In Miyagawa, S and Saito, M (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Japanese linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 54–83.Google Scholar
Ivanova-Sullivan, T (2014) Theoretical and experimental aspects of syntax-discourse interface in heritage grammars. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R (1971) Gapping and related rules. Linguistic Inquiry 2, 21–35.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R (1972) Semantic interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jia, L and Bayley, R (2008) The (re)acquisition of perfective aspect marking by Chinese heritage language learners. In He, AW and Xiao, Y (eds.), Chinese as a heritage language: Fostering rooted world citizenry. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i at Manoa.Google Scholar
Johannessen, JB (2015) Attrition in an American Norwegian heritage language speaker. In Johannessen, JB and Salmons, JC (eds.), Germanic heritage languages in North America. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 46–71.Google Scholar
Kallestinova, ED (2007) Aspects of word order in Russian. Ph. D. thesis, University of Iowa.Google Scholar
Kan, RT and Schmid, MS (2019) Development of tonal discrimination in young heritage speakers of Cantonese. Journal of Phonetics 73, 40–54.Google Scholar
Kang, B.-M. (1998) Three kinds of Korean reflexives: A corpus linguistic investigation on grammar and usage. In Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC12). 10–19.Google Scholar
Kanno, Y (2000) Bilingualism and identity: The stories of Japanese returnees. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 3, 1–18.Google Scholar
Kasstan, J, Auer, A and Salmons, J (2018) Heritage-language speakers: Theoretical and empirical challenges on sociolinguistic attitudes and prestige. International Journal of Bilingualism 22, 387–394.Google Scholar
Keating, GD, Jegerski, J and VanPatten, B (2016) Online processing of subject pronouns in monolingual and heritage bilingual speakers of Mexican Spanish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19, 36–49.Google Scholar
Keating, GD, VanPatten, B and Jegerski, J (2011) Who was walking on the beach? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33, 193–221.Google Scholar
Kim, J-H, Montrul, S and Yoon, J (2009) Binding interpretations of anaphors by Korean heritage speakers. Language Acquisition 16, 3–35.Google Scholar
Kim, J-H, Montrul, S and Yoon, J (2010) Dominant language influence in acquisition and attrition of binding: Interpretation of the Korean reflexive caki. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13, 73–84.Google Scholar
Kim, Y-S (2000) Caykwitaymyengsa-uy hyengthay-thongsaloncek pwunsek: Choysocwu.uycek cepkun [A morphosyntactic analysis of reflexives: A minimalist approach]. Studies in Modern Grammar 19, 1–26.Google Scholar
Ko, H and Seo, S (2012) NP-ellipsis revisited: The role of D feature. Studies in Generative Grammar 22, 677–702.Google Scholar
Koornneef, A, Avrutin, S, Wijnen, F and Reuland, E (2011) Tracking the preference for bound-variable dependencies in ambiguous ellipses and only-structures. In Runner, J (ed.), Experiments at the interfaces (vol. 2). Leiden: Emerald Publishers/Brill, pp. 67–100.Google Scholar
Köpke, B, Schmid, MS, Keijzer, M and Dostert, S (eds.) (2007) Language attrition: Theoretical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Kramer, R (2014) Clitic doubling or object agreement: The view from Amharic. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 32, 1033–1088.Google Scholar
Kramer, R (2015) The morphosyntax of gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuno, S (1973) The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T (2007) Determiners in bilingual German-Italian children: What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10, 57–78.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T (2012) Specific and generic subjects in the Italian of German-Italian simultaneous bilinguals and L2 learners. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15, 736–756.Google Scholar
Kuroda, S-Y (1970) Japanese syntax and semantics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Laleko, O (2010) The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface in Language Loss: Covert Restructuring of Aspect in Heritage Russian. Ph. D. thesis, University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Laleko, O and Polinsky, M (2013) Marking topic or marking case? A comparative investigation of heritage Japanese and heritage Korean. Heritage Language Journal 10, 40–64.Google Scholar
Laleko, O and Polinsky, M (2016) Between syntax and discourse: Topic and case marking in heritage speakers and L2 learners of Japanese and Korean. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6, 396–439.Google Scholar
Laleko, O and Polinsky, M (2017) Silence is difficult. On missing elements in bilingual grammars. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 36, 135–163.Google Scholar
Levine, G (2000) Incomplete L1 acquisition in the immigrant situation: Yiddish in the Unites States. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Levy, R (2008) Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106, 1126–1177.Google Scholar
Lin, T-HJ (2013) QR and finiteness. In Miyamoto, Y, Takahashi, D, Maki, H, Ochi, M, Sugisaki, K and Uchibori, A (eds.), Deep insights, broad perspectives: Essays in honor of Mamoru Saito. Tokyo: Kaitakusha, pp. 275–291.Google Scholar
Lipski, JM (1996) Patterns of pronominal evolution in Cuban-American bilinguals. In Roca, A and Jensen, JB (eds.), Spanish in contact: Issues in bilingualism. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 159–186.Google Scholar
Lustres, E (2018) The acquisition of obligatory and variable subjunctive mood selection in temporal and concessive clauses in heritage and L2 Spanish. Ph. D. thesis, Purdue University.Google Scholar
Lynch, A (2014) The first decade of the Heritage Language Journal: A retrospective view of research on heritage languages. Heritage Language Journal 11, 224–242.Google Scholar
Madsen, CN (2018) De-centering the monolingual: A psychophysiological study of heritage speaker language processing. Ph. D. thesis, CUNY Graduate Center.Google Scholar
Marlo, MR (2014) Exceptional patterns of object marking in Bantu. Studies in African Linguistics 43, 85–123.Google Scholar
Meisel, J (1986) Word order and case marking in early child language: Evidence from simultaneous acquisition of two first languages. Linguistics 24, 123–183.Google Scholar
Meisel, J (ed.), (1990) Two first languages. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Meisel, J (2007) The weaker language in early child bilingualism: Acquiring a first language as a second language? Applied Psycholinguistics 28, 495–514.Google Scholar
Merino, B (1983) Language loss in bilingual Chicano children. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 4, 277–294.Google Scholar
Montrul, S (2002) Incomplete acquisition and attrition of Spanish tense/aspect distinctions in adult bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 5, 39–68.Google Scholar
Montrul, S (2004) Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morphosyntactic convergence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7, 125–142.Google Scholar
Montrul, S (2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism. Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Montrul, S (2011) Morphological errors in Spanish second language learners and heritage speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33, 155–161.Google Scholar
Montrul, S (2016) The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Montrul, S and Ionin, T (2010) Transfer effects in the interpretation of definite articles by Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13, 449–473.Google Scholar
Montrul, S and Sánchez-Walker, N (2013) Differential object marking in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. Language Acquisition 20, 109–132.Google Scholar
Moon, S-C (1995) An optimality approach to long-distance anaphors. Ph. D. thesis, University of Washington.Google Scholar
Müller, N (1998) Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1, 151–171.Google Scholar
O'Grady, W, Lee, M and Choo, M (2001) The acquisition of relative clauses by heritage and non-heritage learners of Korean as a second language: A comparative study. Journal of Korean Language Education 12, 283–294.Google Scholar
Otheguy, R, Zentella, AC and Livert, D (2007) Language and dialect contact in Spanish in New York: Toward the formation of a speech community. Language 83, 770–803.Google Scholar
Pallier, C (2007) Critical periods in language acquisition and language attrition. In Köpke, B, Schmid, M, Keijzer, M and Dostert, S (eds.), Language attrition: Theoretical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 155–188.Google Scholar
Partee, B (1973) Some structural analogies between tenses and pronouns in English. Journal of Philosophy 70, 601–609.Google Scholar
Perez-Cortes, S (2016) Acquiring obligatory and variable mood selection: Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners’ performance in desideratives and reported speech contexts. Ph. D. thesis, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, AT and Glass, WR (1999) Null anaphora in Spanish second language acquisition: Probabilistic versus generative approaches. Second Language Research 15, 220–249.Google Scholar
Picallo, MC (1991) Nominals and nominalization in Catalan. Probus 3, 279–316.Google Scholar
Pickering, MJ and Traxler, MJ (1998) Plausibility and recovery from garden-paths: An eye-tracking study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 24, 940–961.Google Scholar
Pires, A and Rothman, J (2009) Disentangling sources of incomplete acquisition: An explanation for competence divergence across heritage grammars. International Journal of Bilingualism 13, 211–238.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M (2011) Reanalysis in adult heritage language: A case for attrition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33, 305–328.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M (2016) Structure vs. use in heritage language. Linguistics Vanguard 2, 20150036.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M (2018a) Bilingual children and adult heritage speakers: The range of comparison. International Journal of Bilingualism 22, 547–563.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M (2018b) Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Potowski, K (ed.), (2018) The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Preminger, O (2009) Breaking agreements: Distinguishing agreement and clitic doubling by their failures. Linguistic Inquiry 40, 619–666.Google Scholar
Preminger, O (2014) Agreement and its failures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Putnam, MT and Salmons, JS (2013) Losing their (passive) voice: Syntactic neutralization in heritage German. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 3, 233–252.Google Scholar
Pye, C and Pfeiler, B (2017) A comparative study of the acquisition of nominative and ergative alignment in European and Mayan languages. In Coon, J, Massam, D and Travis, LD (eds.), The Oxford handbook of ergativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Quesada, M (2015) The L2 acquisition of Spanish subjects: Multiple perspectives. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Radeva-Bork, T (2012) Single and double clitics in adult and child grammar. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Rakhilina, E, Vyrenkova, A and Polinsky, M (2016) Linguistic creativity in heritage speakers. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 1, 1–29.Google Scholar
Reuland, EJ (2011) Anaphora and language design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rinke, E and Flores, C (2014) Morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics by Portuguese heritage bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17, 681–699.Google Scholar
Ritter, E (1993) Where's gender? Linguistic Inquiry 24, 795–803.Google Scholar
Ronai, E (2018) Quantifier scope in heritage bilinguals: A comparative experimental study. In Hucklebridge, S and Nelson, M (eds.), Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (vol. 3). Amherst, MA: GLSA, University of Massachusetts, pp. 29–38.Google Scholar
Rothman, J (2007a) Heritage speaker competence differences, language change, and input type: Inflected infinitives in heritage Brazilian Portuguese. International Journal of Bilingualism 11, 359–389.Google Scholar
Rothman, J (2007b) Pragmatic solutions for syntactic problems: Understanding some L2 syntactic errors in terms of pragmatic deficits. In Baauw, S, Dirjkoningen, F and Pinto, M (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 299–320.Google Scholar
Rothman, J (2009) Understanding the nature and outcomes of early bilingualism: Romance languages as heritage languages. International Journal of Bilingualism 13, 155–163.Google Scholar
Saito, M, Lin, T-HJ and Murasugi, K (2008) N0-ellipsis and the structure of noun phrases in Chinese and Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 17, 247–271.Google Scholar
Santos, AL (2009) Minimal answers: Ellipsis, syntax and discourse in the acquisition of European Portuguese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sanz, C and Torres, J (2018) The prior language experience of heritage bilinguals. In Malovrh, PA and Benati, AG (eds.), The handbook of advanced proficiency in second language acquisition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 179–198.Google Scholar
Schlyter, S (1993) The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children. In Hyltenstam, K and Viberg, A (eds.), Progression and regression in language: Sociocultural, neuropsychological and linguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 289–308.Google Scholar
Schmid, M (2011 ). Language attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schmid, M, Köpke, B, Keijzer, M and Weilemar, L (eds.) (2004) First language attrition. Interdisciplinary perspectives on methodological issues. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schwartz, M and Minkov, M (2014) Russian case system acquisition among Russian-Hebrew speaking children. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 22, 51–92.Google Scholar
Schwartz, M, Minkov, M, Dieser, E, Protassova, E, Moin, V and Polinsky, M (2014) Acquisition of Russian gender agreement by monolingual and bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 19, 726–752.Google Scholar
Scontras, G, Badecker, W and Fedorenko, E (2017a) Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production: A reply to MacDonald, Montag, and Gennari (2016). Cognitive Science 41, 2280–2287.Google Scholar
Scontras, G, Badecker, W, Shank, L, Lim, E and Fedorenko, E (2015a) Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production. Cognitive Science 39, 559–583.Google Scholar
Scontras, G, Fuchs, Z and Polinsky, M (2015b) Heritage language and linguistic theory. Frontiers in Psychology 6(1545).Google Scholar
Scontras, G, Polinsky, M and Fuchs, Z (2018) In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 3, 1.Google Scholar
Scontras, G, Polinsky, M, Tsai, C-YE and Mai, K (2017b) Cross-linguistic scope ambiguity: When two systems meet. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 2, 36.Google Scholar
Sekerina, I and Sauermann, A (2015) Visual attention and quantifier-spreading in heritage Russian bilinguals. Second Language Research 31, 75–104.Google Scholar
Sekerina, I and Sauermann, A (2017) Quantifier spreading in child eye movements: A case of the Russian quantifier kazhdyj ‘every’. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 2, 66.Google Scholar
Sekerina, I and Trueswell, JC (2011) Processing of contrastiveness by heritage Russian bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14, 280–300.Google Scholar
Seliger, HW and Vago, RM (1991) First language attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L (2007) Cross-linguistic influence in the interpretation of anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns in English–Italian bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10, 225–238.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L, Sorace, A and Paoli, S (2004) Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax-pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English-Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7, 183–205.Google Scholar
Sherkina-Lieber, M (2011) Knowledge of Labrador Inuttitut functional morphology by receptive bilinguals. Ph. D. thesis, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Sherkina-Lieber, M (2015) Tense, aspect, and agreement in heritage Labrador Inuttitut. Do receptive bilinguals understand functional morphology? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 5, 30–61.Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C (1994) Language contact and change. Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C (2003) Linguistic consequences of reduced input in bilingual first language acquisition. In Montrul, S and Ordóñez, F (eds.), Linguistic theory and language development in Hispanic languages. Cascadilla Press, pp. 375–397.Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C (2014) Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sorace, A (2011) Pinning down the concept of ‘interface’ in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 1–33.Google Scholar
Sorace, A and Filiaci, F (2006) Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research 22, 339–368.Google Scholar
Sorace, A and Serratrice, L (2009) Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap. International Journal of Bilingualism 13, 195–210.Google Scholar
Sorace, A, Serratrice, L, Filiaci, F and Baldo, M (2009) Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children. Lingua 119, 460–477.Google Scholar
Tomioka, S (2010) Contrastive topics operate on speech acts. In Zimmermann, M and Féry, C (eds.), Information structure: Theoretical, typological, and experimental perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 115–138.Google Scholar
Treisman, AM (1969) Strategies and models of selective attention. Psychological Review 76, 282–299.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I (2007) First language attrition from a minimalist perspective. In Köpke, B, Schmid, MS, Kejzer, M and Dostert, S (eds.), Language attrition: Theoretical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 83–98.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I (2014) Early, late or very late? Timing acquisition and bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 4, 283–313.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I, Sorace, A, Heycock, C and Filiaci, F (2004) First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism 8, 257–277.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I, Sorace, A, Heycock, C, Filiaci, F and Bouba, M (2003) Subjects in L1 attrition: Evidence from Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. Proceedings of the Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development 27, 787–797.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S (2015) Amount of exposure as a proxy for dominance in bilingual language acquisition. In Silva-Corvalán, C and Treffers-Daller, J (eds.), Language dominance in bilinguals: Issues of measurement and operationalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 156–173.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S (2016) Quantity and quality of language input in bilingual language development. In Nicoladis, E and Montanari, S (eds.), Lifespan perspectives on bilingualism. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 136–196.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S (in press) Quantifying language experience in heritage language development. In Schmid, M and Köpke, B (eds.), The Oxford handbook of language attrition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Valdés, G (2000) Introduction. In Spanish for native speakers, Volume I. 1–32. New York: Harcourt College.Google Scholar
Valian, V (2015) Bilingualism and cognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18, 3–24.Google Scholar
Varlokosta, S, Belletti, A, Costa, J, Friedmann, N, Gavarró, A, Grohmann, KK, Guasti, MT, Tuller, L, Lobo, M, Anđelković, D, Argemí, N, Avram, L, Berends, S, Brunetto, V, Delage, H, Ezeizabarrena, M-J, Fattal, I, Haman, E, van Hout, A, de López, KJ, Katsos, N, Kologranic, L, Krstić, N, Kraljevic, JK, Miȩkisz, A, Nerantzini, M, Queraltó, C, Radic, Z, Ruiz, S, Sauerland, U, Sevcenco, A, Smoczyńska, M, Theodorou, E, van der Lely, H, Veenstra, A, Weston, J, Yachini, M and Yatsushiro, K (2016) A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production. Language Acquisition 23, 1–26.Google Scholar
Vermeulen, R (2011) The syntax of topic, contrast and contrastive topic. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 58.Google Scholar
Viswanath, A (2013) Heritage English in Israeli children. B.A. thesis, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Watanabe, A (2010) Notes on nominal ellipsis and the nature of no and classifiers in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 19, 61–74.Google Scholar
Watson, GJ (1996) The Finnish-Australian English corpus. ICAME Journal 20, 41–70.Google Scholar
White, L (1985) The “pro-drop” parameter in adult second language acquisition. Language Learning 35, 47–61.Google Scholar
Yang, B (2015) Perception and production of Mandarin tones by native speakers and L2 learners. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Zeller, J (2015) Argument prominence and agreement: Explaining an unexpected object asymmetry in Zulu. Lingua 156, 17–39.Google Scholar