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Getting at the source of (some) differences in heritage language bilingualism

Date
Date
Wednesday 4 May 2016, 12:00 - 13:00
Location
Baines Wing, SR 2.08

Everyone is welcome at the next guest talk organised by Linguistics and Phonetics (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies).

The talk will be delivered by Prof. Jason Rothman (University of Reading) in Baines Wing, SR 2.08.

Getting at the source of (some) differences in heritage language bilingualism and why terminology matters

In this talk, I will first introduce the audience to and problematize both the concept of what a heritage language bilingual is and the literature  that has studied their competence outcomes in adulthood over the past two decades.  Heritage speakers are native (Rothman & Treffers Daller)–often child L1 or 2L1 tested as adults– speakers of a minority “home” language who (usually) become dominant speakers starting at school-age in the external societal majority language of the national community in which they grow up and are educated (e.g. Korean minority speakers growing up in Japan or ethnic Hispanic speakers in the United States).  Typically, heritage speakers show interesting differences in their knowledge and performance in the heritage language as compared to age-matched monolinguals.  Often, such differences have been labelled as instances of incomplete acquisition (e.g. Montrul 2008, 2016) or attrition (Polinsky 2011).  Under both accounts, although for different reasons, heritage language bilingual differences are viewed as some type of deficiency.  I will propose that many differences, alternatively, could have only developed the way we see them in heritage grammars for reasons related to qualitative differences in the input heritage speakers receive (e.g. Rothman 2007; Pires and Rothman 2009;  Pascual y Cabo and Rothman 2012).  In doing so, I will link a process of cross-generational attrition to (some) outcomes in heritage language development. I conclude by suggesting that many aspects argued to be incompletely acquired in heritage language bilingual grammars are in fact complete, but unavoidably different from inappropriately match monolingual baselines.  I will further argue that the entire term incomplete acquisition is fundamentally inaccurate on conceptual, empirical and theoretical grounds (see Pascual y Cabo and Rothman, 2012; Kupisch and Rothman, in press), offering alternative terms for the outcomes of heritage bilingualism where differences obtain as compared to monolinguals.