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Abstract

Abstract

Recent research has highlighted the value of investigating the online language processing of heritage speakers (HS) as a means of accessing their implicit language knowledge (Montrul, 2023). While studies have shown that Spanish and Polish HS use grammatical gender cues to predict upcoming nouns (Fuchs, 2022a, 2022b), less is known about Vietnamese HS’ use of prenominal classifiers (e.g., for animate objects, for inanimate objects) to facilitate their processing (but see Ito et al., 2024). This study examined if and how home-country raised and heritage speakers of Vietnamese in the U.S. use classifiers to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns, and whether heritage language proficiency is a modulating factor. Forty-one adult native speakers of Vietnamese (18 home-country raised, 23 HS) completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, an offline cloze test to assess knowledge of classifier–noun pairings, and a Vietnamese listening proficiency test. The results indicate that despite more variable knowledge of classifier–noun pairings and generally slower lexical access, HS use classifiers as a semantically informative cue during real-time comprehension, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent than their home-country raised peers. Increased proficiency in the heritage language, whether measured objectively or self-rated, was not found to enhance engagement in prediction.

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2024-12-02
2025-01-20

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/content/journals/10.1075/lab.24001.ngu
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Facilitative use of classifiers in heritage Vietnamese
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.24001.ngu
/content/journals/10.1075/lab.24001.ngu
/content/journals/10.1075/lab.24001.ngu
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: heritage ; eye-tracking ; Vietnamese ; classifiers ; listening proficiency

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