A child growing up in the UK speaking Greek at home may struggle to understand who did what to whom in a sentence, because English and Greek use different grammatical rules to mark that relationship. This project investigates how heritage bilingual children—those who speak a minority language at home and a dominant societal language outside it—process and produce their heritage language under reduced input and the influence of the dominant language. The problem is that current understanding of these learning mechanisms is limited, despite the growing number of bilinguals worldwide. The researchers will test Greek and Romanian heritage children in the UK, Germany, and Spain using eye-tracking and production tasks, comparing them to monolingual children in Greece and Romania. The language pairs were chosen for their overlapping or contrasting grammatical features—for example, Spanish and Romanian share a marker for direct objects, while German and Greek share case marking. If successful, this fundamental science will clarify how bilingual children integrate linguistic information in real time and how the societal language shapes that process. The findings could inform language educators and policymakers on how to support heritage language maintenance across diverse European communities.
View original technical description
In the current world characterised by migration waves, many migrant children grow up in the country of residence speaking a language in the home and/or community, their heritage language, that is different from the societal language. This language acquisition context, characterised by reduced input conditions and influence of a more dominant societal language, can impact the learning mechanisms and outcomes of heritage language development. Despite the growing numbers of bilinguals across the world, our understanding of how heritage language processing mechanisms develop under reduced input and under influence of the dominant language remains limited. The present project aims to fill this gap by examining how heritage bilingual children of migrant background develop their heritage language skills in the country of residence, and whether properties of the societal language facilitate or slow down that development. To address this aim, we focus on children’s comprehension and production of grammatical properties in their heritage language, properties which may overlap or differ from those of the societal language. For example, understanding who did what to whom is a fundamental property of human communication. Languages differ, however, in the linguistic devices that they use to convey this information. English relies on word order to denote the agent and the patient; in contrast, Greek and Romanian – the two heritage languages targeted in this project – employ case and Differential Object marking/DOM, respectively, to denote agent-patient relationships. By implementing a cross-national project across five European countries, we will address the following three objectives: 1) to determine whether children integrate linguistic information in their heritage language to predict upcoming input and how this is linked to production, 2) to assess if the presence or absence of overlapping morphosyntactic properties between the heritage language and the societal language impacts production and predictive processing, and 3) to unravel how experiential and exposure factors in heritage communities modulate language outcomes beyond typological proximity. To address objectives 1 and 2, we will test Greek and Romanian heritage language children growing up in three countries: the UK, Germany and Spain, and monolingually-raised children growing up in the countries of origin (Greece and Romania). The language combinations have been strategically selected because of their overlapping or contrasting grammatical properties: Spanish and Romanian share DOM; German and Greek share case marking; all four languages but English share grammatical gender (the other grammatical property targeted in the project). We will administer child-friendly eye tracking tasks that capture how children comprehend language in real time as they hear it, and elicited production tasks. To address objective 3, we will measure children’s bilingual experience using a parental questionnaire. This questionnaire captures the large variability that characterises heritage development (due to differences in age of societal language exposure, heritage language use, input quantity/quality, schooling) and heritage language community profiles (e.g., migration generation). The project has theoretical and empirical contributions for formal linguistics, developmental linguistics, bilingualism and cognitive psychology. It advances our understanding of how bilingual children process linguistic information, how processing and production are shaped by the societal language and by the diverse profile of heritage language communities. Crucially, it is highly relevant for language educators, language policy stakeholders, and parents. Our project will highlight the heterogeneity of heritage language communities and their needs for heritage language maintenance across different European countries, potentially informing language education and policy.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know