We examined the production and perception of voiced versus voiceless obstruents by thirty-three adolescent heritage speakers of Polish and Russian. First, a word list task was used to elicit the production of voiced and voiceless plosives in word-initial position. Voice onset time (VOT) values for both sets of stops were compared to the values reported for monolingual Polish and Russian speakers. To investigate the perception of phoneme contrasts in the heritage language, we used an auditory phoneme discrimination task that contained ten minimal pairs of real and nonce words with contrasting voiced and voiceless obstruents. The results showed an almost perfect perceptual discrimination and a separation of voiced and voiceless plosives in production; however, the VOT values differed significantly from those of monolinguals. Both groups showed convergence of VOT values towards the values reported for fortis and lenis stops in the majority language (i.e., German), leading to a non-native accent in the heritage language.

Heritage speakers of Slavic languages constitute a large proportion of heritage speaker communities worldwide. Slavic heritage communities manifest a strong feeling of loyalty toward the home language and culture as well as the establishment of institutions (churches, clubs, community schools, etc.) that support language and culture maintenance. Recent research on heritage speakers of Russian in the United States suggests that the preservation of family ties remains the core motivation for language maintenance. On the linguistic level, Slavic heritage languages reveal striking parallels regarding the restructuring, partial reduction, and simplification of phonology, grammar, and the lexicon. While the majority language without doubt exerts a pervasive impact on the respective Slavic heritage grammar and lexicon, parallel developments in the same heritage language spoken in different countries hint at more universal principles of language change being at play in reshaping heritage grammars. As some heritage languages have received more attention than others, more systematic comparative research is needed to shed additional light on these language-independent developments.