The Development of the Heritage Language in Childhood Bi-/Multilingualism

doi:10.1017/9781108669771.029

23 - The Development of the Heritage Language in Childhood Bi-/Multilingualism

from Part Five - Socialization in Childhood Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2022

Silvina Montrul

Edited by

Anat Stavans and

Ulrike Jessner

Show author details

Anat Stavans: Affiliation:
Beit Berl College, Israel
Ulrike Jessner: Affiliation:
Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria

Book contents

Get access

Summary

The vast majority of children grow up in bilingual or multilingual households, but the extent to which they develop advanced linguistic abilities and even literacy in all their languages depends on many factors. These include age of acquisition of the two languages, the amount of exposure to and use of the languages daily and in specific or diverse contexts, and the status of the languages in the society, including access to schooling. For some simultaneous and sequential bilingual children, one or more of their languages is a minority language not widely spoken outside the home and with little cultural, educational, social and political status. In some other circumstances, the language or languages can be minoritized, available beyond the home but considered lower in status in the society. In this chapter, I discuss research on the development of the minority/heritage language(s) in simultaneous and sequential bilingual and multilingual children, with specific focus on the school-age period. I focus on how bilingual balance and language shift in these children and in many cases lead to language attrition and incomplete acquisition of morphosyntactic aspects of the minority language.

Keywords

simultaneous bilinguals/multilinguals sequential bilinguals attrition incomplete acquisition morphosyntax

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism , pp. 537 - 554

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669771.029 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Albirini, A. (2015). Factors affecting the acquisition of plural morphology in Jordanian Arabic. Journal of Child Language, 42(4), 734–62.Google Scholar

Allen, S. (2007). The future of Inuktitut in the face of majority languages: Bilingualism or language shift? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(3), 515–36.CrossRef Google Scholar

Allen, S. Crago, M., & Presco, D. (2006). The effect of majority language exposure on minority language skills: The case of Inuktitut. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(5), 578–96.Google Scholar

Anderson, R. (1999). Loss of gender agreement in L1 attrition: Preliminary results. Bilingual Research Journal, 23(4), 389–408.Google Scholar

Anderson, R. (2001). Lexical morphology and verb use in child first language loss. A preliminary case study investigation. International Journal of Bilingualism, 5(4), 377–401.CrossRef Google Scholar

Cenoz, J. (2013). The influence of bilingualism on third language acquisition: Focus on multilingualism. Language Teaching, 46(1), 71–86.CrossRef Google Scholar

Coşkun-Kunduz, A. & Montrul, S. (2021). Sources of variability in the acquisition of Differential Object Marking by Turkish heritage language children in the United States. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–14.Google Scholar

Cummins, J., & Danesi, M. (1990). Heritage Languages: The Development and Denial of Canada’s Linguistic Resources. Toronto: Garamond Press.Google Scholar

Deuchar, M., & Quay, S. (2000). Bilingual Acquisition: Theoretical Implications of a Case Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Domínguez, L., Hicks, G., & Slabakova, R. (2019). Choice of words matters, but so does scientific accuracy: Reply to peer commentaries. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(2), 283–86.Google Scholar

Flores, C., & Barbosa, P. (2014). When reduced input leads to delayed acquisition: A study on the acquisition of clitic placement by Portuguese heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(3), 304–25.Google Scholar

Fukuda, M. (2017). Language use in the context of double minority: The case of Japanese–Catalan/Spanish families in Catalonia. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(4), 401–18.Google Scholar

Gathercole, V. C. M., & Thomas, E. M. (2009). Bilingual first-language development: Dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(2), 213–37.CrossRef Google Scholar

Grosjean, F. (2008). Studying Bilinguals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Hakuta, K., & D’Andrea, D. (1992). Some properties of bilingual maintenance and loss in Mexican background high-school students. Applied Linguistics, 13(1), 72–99.Google Scholar

Jia, G., & Aaronson, D. (2003). A longitudinal study of Chinese children and adolescents learning English in the United States. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(1), 131–61.CrossRef Google Scholar

Jia, R., & Paradis, J. (2015). The use of referring expressions in narratives by Mandarin heritage language children and the role of language environment factors in predicting individual differences. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(4), 737–52.Google Scholar

Jia, R., & Paradis, J. (2020). The acquisition of relative clauses by Mandarin heritage language children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 10(20), 153–83.CrossRef Google Scholar

Juan-Garau, M. (2014). Heritage language use and maintenance in multilingual communities. Applied Linguistics Review, 5(2), 425–40.CrossRef Google Scholar

Kaufman, D., & Aronoff, M. (1991). Morphological disintegration and reconstruction in first language attrition. In Seliger, H. & Vago, R., eds., First Language Attrition, pp. 175–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

Kupisch, T., & Rothman, J. (2018). Terminology matters! Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(5), 564–82.Google Scholar

Maneva, B., & Genesee, F. (2002). Bilingual babbling: Evidence for language differentiation in dual language acquisition. In Skarabela, B., Fish, S., & Do, A. H.-J., eds., Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 383–92. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar

Merino, B. (1983). Language loss in bilingual Chicano children. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 4(3), 277–94.CrossRef Google Scholar

Montanari, S. (2006). Language Differentiation in Early Trilingual Development: Evidence from a Case Study. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar

Montanari, S. (2009). Multi-word combinations and the emergence of differentiated ordering patterns in early trilingual development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(4), 503–19.Google Scholar

Montanari, S. (2013). Productive trilingualism in infancy. What makes it possible? World Journal of English Language, 3(1), 62–77.Google Scholar

Montrul, S. (2002). Incomplete acquisition and attrition of Spanish tense/aspect distinctions in adult bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(1), 39–68.Google Scholar

Montrul, S. (2008). Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism. Reexamining the Age Factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

Montrul, S. (2016). The Acquisition of Heritage Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Montrul, S., & Potowski, K. (2007). Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(3), 301–28.Google Scholar

Montrul, S., & Silva-Corvalán, C. (2019). The social context contributes to the incomplete acquisition of aspects of heritage languages. A critical commentary. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(2), 269–273.CrossRef Google Scholar

Montrul, S., Bhatt, R., Bhatia, A., & Puri, V. (2019). Case marking in Hindi as the weaker language. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 461, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00461.Google Scholar

Montrul, S., & Yoon, J. (2019). Morphology in language attrition. In Aronoff, M. et al., eds., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, oxfordre.com/linguistics.Google Scholar

Mueller Gathercole, V. (2002a). Command of the mass/count distinction in bilingual and monolingual children. An English morphosyntactic distinction. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R., eds., Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 175–206.Google Scholar

Mueller Gathercole, V. (2002b). Grammatical gender in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. A Spanish morphosyntactic distinction. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R., eds., Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 207–19.Google Scholar

Mueller Gathercole, V. (2002c). Monolingual and bilingual acquisition. Learning different treatments of the that-trace phenomena in English and Spanish. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R., eds., Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 220–54.CrossRef Google Scholar

O’Grady, W., Kwak, H. Y., Lee, O.-S., & Lee, M. (2011). An emergentist perspective on heritage language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(2), 223–46.CrossRef Google Scholar

Oller, K., & Jarmulowicz, L. (2009). Language and literacy in bilingual children in the early school years. In Hoff, E. & Shatz, M., eds., Blackwell Handbook of Language Development. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 368–87.Google Scholar

Oller, D. K., Pearson, B., & Cobo-Lewis, A. (2007). Profile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(2), 495–514.CrossRef Google Scholar PubMed

Otheguy, R. (2016). The linguistic competence of second-generation bilinguals: A critique of “incomplete acquisition”. In Tortora, C., den Dikken, M., Montoya, I. L., & O’Neill, T., eds., Romance Linguistics 2013. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 301–20.Google Scholar

Paradis, J. (2001). Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems? International Journal of Bilingualism, 5(1), 19–38.Google Scholar

Paradis, J. (2007). Early bilingualism and multilingual acquisition. In Auer, P. & Li, W., eds., Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 15–44.Google Scholar

Paradis, J. (2011). Individual differences in child English second language acquisition: Comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(3), 213–37.Google Scholar

Pascual y Cabo, D., & Rothman, J. (2012). The (il)logical problem of heritage speaker bilingualism and incomplete acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 33(4), 450–55.Google Scholar

Pearson, B. (2007). Social factors in childhood bilingualism in the United States. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(3), 399–410.CrossRef Google Scholar

Pearson, B., Fernández, S., & Oller, D. (1995). Cross-language synonyms in the lexicons of bilingual infants: One system or two? Journal of Child Language, 22(2), 345–68.Google Scholar

Polinsky, M. (2006). Incomplete acquisition: American Russian. Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 14(2), 191–262.Google Scholar

Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage Languages and Their Speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Quay, S. (2008). Dinner conversations with a trilingual two-year-old: Language socialization in a multilingual context. First Language, 28(1), 5–33.Google Scholar

Silva-Corvalán, C. (2014). Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the First Six Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Silva-Corvalán, C. (2018). Bilingual acquisition: Difference or incompleteness? In Shin, N. L. & Erker, D., eds., Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in Honor of Ricardo Otheguy. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 245–68.Google Scholar

Stavans, A., Olshtain, E., & Goldzweig, G. (2009). Parental perceptions of children’s literacy and bilingualism: The case of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 30(2), 111–26.Google Scholar

Wong-Fillmore, L. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6(3), 323–46.Google Scholar

Wright, S., Taylor, D., & Macarthur, J. (2000). Subtractive bilingualism and the survival of the Inuit language: Heritage-versus second-language education. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(1), 63–84.Google Scholar