REANALYSIS IN ADULT HERITAGE LANGUAGE: New Evidence in Support of Attrition

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. Adul...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inStudies in second language acquisition Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 305 - 328
Main Author Polinsky, Maria
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge University Press 01.06.2011
Subjects
Adults
Bilingualism
Child Language
Children
Comparative Analysis
English
First language acquisition
Gift giving
Grammar
Heritage Language
Language
Language Acquisition
Language comprehension
Linguistics
Monolingualism
Native Language
Phrase Structure
Relative Clauses
Russian
Second Language Learning
Syntactics
Transfer
Verbs
Word Order
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Summary: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.
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ISSN:0272-2631
1470-1545
DOI:10.1017/S027226311000077X