This project contributed to research on heritage language/HL bilingualism by bringing new insight into the processing mechanisms underlying real-time language comprehension in child and adult heritage speakers/HSs (early bilinguals who acquire their first language/L1 in a minority setting under reduced input conditions and under the influence of the dominant language/L2 of the society they live in).
The overall objectives were to a. uncover whether child/adult HSs process HL input in real time similarly to monolingual L1 speakers; b. examine whether child/adult HSs are sensitive to grammatical cues like case-marking and number agreement in their HL; c. compare HSs’ ability to exploit these cues for comprehension to their ability to use them in production; (iv) determine whether the presence/absence of similar cues in the dominant L2 lead to differences in HL processing and/or production.
The project brought Romanian, a less investigated language in bilingualism research, to the spotlight and exploited some of its language specific properties to better understand how children (and adults) with a migration background develop their HL and how this may be affected by contact with the L2. Romanian provides various grammatical cues that speakers can use to interpret complex syntactic structures like object "which"-questions. For example, a Differential Object Marker/DOM, "pe" comes before an object wh-word and the subject agrees in number with the verb. ("Pe care băieți îi îmbrățișeaza bunicul?/Which boys is the grandfather hugging?"). To uncover whether child/adult Romanian HSs can use disambiguating cues like DOM and number agreement when processing input in their HL in real time and whether the presence/absence of such cues in their societal language affects the processing and production of "which"-questions in the HL, the project focused on Romanian HSs with L2 German. The project thus investigated whether number agreement, present both in Romanian and in German, represents a stronger cue for HSs in disambiguating between subject and object "which"-questions, than DOM only, which is present in the HL, but not in the L2.
The conclusions of the project are that the presence of DOM on the wh-word in Romanian does not eliminate the subject-object asymmetry found cross-linguistically for the comprehension of "which"-questions and that this asymmetry is stronger in the younger children, as reflected by the effect of age on offline comprehension in monolingual and heritage children alike. The results also suggest that the cue from number agreement guides online processing of object "which"-questions more than DOM on its own, in monolingual children and all groups of adults. The online data also reflect lower rates of correct responses and qualitatively similar, but slower processing in children relative to adults. When comparing the monolingual and HL children, we see that, on a group level, the HS children have more difficulties with the comprehension and production of object "which"-questions relative to the monolingual children. Although number agreement does not seem to impact offline comprehension in either group, the online data suggest that this mismatch guides monolingual children’s online processing more than DOM on its own. The fact that the heritage children do not seem to recruit the number information in the online processing of a short syntactic dependency could indicate more protracted processing, i.e. the number information is processed after the end of the sentence because of slower processing speed. This also suggests that the presence of number agreement in the societal language (German) does not seem to impact the use of this cue for HL processing.
