Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Heritage speakers are bilingual speakers exposed to a minority, heritage language commonly spoken within the family and the immediate community, and a majority language, which is dominant in the society and education. Heritage language development offers a unique insight into how linguistic factors, such as the presence of morphosyntactic cues and (non-)canonical word order, may interact with individual differences, such as age and input quantity and quality, to magnify patterns of language development. In the present talk, I present production and comprehension studies investigating how child heritage speakers of typologically different languages (Greek and Chinese) comprehend and produce non-canonical word order structures under the influence of English as the majority language. I review the linguistic and individual factors that modulate performance on these structures, with a particular emphasis on input quantity and quality in heritage language development.