REANALYSIS IN ADULT HERITAGE LANGUAGE

By Maria Polinsky. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2011

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from the monolingual adult controls and from the child HS group. This divergent performance indicates that the adult heritage grammar is not a product of the fossilization of child language. Instead, it suggests that forms existing in the baseline undergo gradual attrition over the life span of a HS. This result is consistent with observations on narrative structure in child and adult HSs (Polinsky, 2008b). Evidence from word order facts suggests that relative clause reanalysis in adult HSs cannot be attributed to transfer from English.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/049b6bdb56c70560f9849b07f2ed00814b08eabb

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Citations in the corpus

Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Spanish Heritage Speakers (2013, methodology): “Such estimated development of DOM is the opposite of what Polinsky (2011) documented with Russian heritage speakers’ comprehension of relative clauses.”
The Acquisition of Heritage Languages: The bilingual development of heritage speakers (2015, background): “Mean accuracy on comprehension of Russian relative clauses (Polinsky 2011 ).”
Heritage language development: Connecting the dots (2018, background): “Polinsky (2011) also found that school-age heritage speakers of Russian were more accurate on comprehension of relative clauses in Russian than adult heritage speakers.”
Understanding heritage languages (2019, background): “…studies documenting the loss of linguistic abilities in heritage speakers over their early lifetime (e.g., Anderson, 1999; Merino, 1983; Silva-Corvalán, 2003, 2014), or 2) a comparison of the abilities of heritage-speaker children vs. adults (e.g., Montrul, 2016; Polinsky, 2011, 2018a).”
Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish heritage speakers* (2013, unknown): “…& Saddah, 2011; Bolonyai, 2007; Montrul, 2002, 2004a, 2007, 2009; Montrul & Bowles, 2009; O’Grady, Kwak, Lee & Lee, 2011; O’Grady, Lee & Choo, 2001; Polinsky, 2011; Rothman, 2007), semantics (Montrul & Ionin, 2010), discourse and pragmatics (Otheguy, Zentella & Livert, 2007; SilvaCorvalán,…”