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REANALYSIS IN ADULT HERITAGE LANGUAGE

New Evidence in Support of Attrition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2011

Maria Polinsky
Maria Polinsky*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
*Address correspondence to: Maria Polinsky, Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Boylston Hall Third Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138; e-mail: polinsky@fas.harvard.edu.
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 33 , Special Issue 2: The Linguistic Competence of Heritage Speakers , June 2011 , pp. 305 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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