Re-exposure Effect in Bilinguals under Language Development (REBUILD)-The Acquisition of Heritage Language in Returnee Children and Mutual Effects of Experience and Cognition

Descrizione del progetto

Uno sguardo ravvicinato ai giovani bilingue

Il percorso linguistico dei bambini immigrati è un tema che attira un’attenzione crescente. Molte giovani menti si muovono su un terreno linguistico complesso in qualità di parlanti di una lingua ereditaria, utilizzando una lingua minoritaria a casa e immergendosi in una società in cui se ne usa una diversa. Tuttavia, questi parlanti bilingue manifestano una gamma diversificata di livelli di competenza nella propria lingua ereditaria, ben più pronunciata rispetto a quanto osservato nei loro coetanei monolingue. Con il sostegno del programma di azioni Marie Skłodowska-Curie, il progetto REBUILD si concentrerà sui rimpatriati, un gruppo sinora oggetto di pochi studi che passa dalle scuole linguistiche a maggioranza straniera al proprio ambiente nativo di lingua ereditaria, esplorando i fattori che determinano i loro risultati in termini di competenza in questa lingua. Analizzando grammatica, cognizione e influenze ambientali, REBUILD fa luce sull’intricato arazzo costituito dal patrimonio bilingue.

Obiettivo

Many (immigrant) children are heritage speakers (HSs; bilinguals who acquire a minority language at home, different from the majority societal language in which they are growing up). Ultimate attainment of the heritage language (HL) varies considerably amongst individual HSs—much more profoundly that what can be noted in monolingual counterparts—despite being naturalistic natives from birth. Understanding what factors explain/predict such differences in HS outcomes is a necessary first step in assessing and, ultimately, being able to meet the educational/interventional needs for bilingual HL development. Re-exposure Effect in Bilinguals Under Language Development (REBUILD) propose a novel approach that combines offline and online methods and focuses on a severely understudied, yet crucially important group of heritage speaker bilinguals, namely returnees. Returnees are children of immigrant families who spend a significant portion of their formative developmental years (school age) in a foreign majority language context, a typical HL scenario, yet return to their native HL environment, often as older children or teenagers. This research is important for the global reality in which HL bilingualism proliferates and HL returnees increase year-on-year. Examining the development of returnee’s native HL from the point of re-exposure to the native environment opens up new directions. While research shows that HL bilingualism (HLB) grammatical outcomes vary significantly, findings are largely limited to contexts in which children grow up and stay in an environment where the native HL is a minority language. Environment transitions—as in the case of returnees—open an exciting opportunity to tease apart internal (grammatical structure, non-linguistic cognitive abilities) and external factors (input, use) accounting for HLB.