Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 15, Issue 6, 2025

The present study investigated the production and receptive knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive mood in volitional clauses by 57 English-dominant heritage speakers in fifth, seventh, and eighth grades (ages 10–14), some of whom were enrolled in a dual-language immersion program. Children’s self-reported frequency of use of Spanish affected command of this structure, and participants showed more consistent selection of the subjunctive than production of this form. There were no differences in production or selection between children in the dual-language immersion and monolingual English schools, but older children produced and selected the subjunctive more than younger participants. The lexical frequency of individual subordinate verbs did not affect subjunctive use. The role for frequency of use and asymmetrical performance between tasks support Putnam and Sánchez’s (2013) activation approach to heritage language acquisition. However, the absence of an effect for bilingual schooling or lexical frequency and the increased use of subjunctive mood with age do not strictly align with theories of a reassembly of features in heritage language acquisition, and argue for a protracted development of subjunctive mood in heritage Spanish.

Using a causal inference approach, we explored the relationships among the language experience determinants of morphosyntactic sensitivity, to identify the factors that indirectly and directly cause its acquisition or maintenance in immigration contexts. We probed the sensitivity to Serbian/Bosnian clitic placement violations with a self-paced listening task, in a diverse group of bilinguals in Norway (n = 71), born to immigrant parents, or having emigrated in childhood or adulthood. The outcomes included a metalinguistic violation detection score and a listening/processing time difference between licit and illicit structures.

Structural Equation Models revealed that literacy (as reading practices) was among the most influential determinants of the ability to detect violations, while Bosnian/Serbian use across contexts and age of bilingualism onset determined violation sensitivity in processing. We identified a significant threshold of societal language (SL) exposure at age 8. Rather than SL exposure before this age precluding bilinguals from developing and maintaining morphosyntactic sensitivity, this threshold seems to reflect a protective effect against attrition which intensifies the later after age 8 SL exposure starts. The length of residence in Norway did not determine attrition, suggesting that heritage and attrited speakers should be considered on a continuum rather than as distinct bilingualism profiles.

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., con for animate objects, cái 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.

While scalar inferences associated with some have featured in most of the past investigations into L2 implicature derivation, this study examines acquisition of pragmatic inferences licensed by adjective pairs (e.g., <intelligent, brilliant>, <dirty, filthy>). Previous work has focused mainly on direct scalar implicatures where an utterance containing a weak scalar term implicates the negation of the stronger. This work extends the investigation to include focus on two additional inference types: indirect scalar implicatures, where not brilliant conveys intelligent, and negative strengthening, a type of manner implicature where not brilliant results in a rather dumb interpretation. Using an inference-judgment paradigm, we test the interplay of these three inference types in adjectival scales for French speakers and L2 French learners and find that response behavior is modulated by the availability of alternative meanings for each participant group. L2 learners demonstrated familiarity with direct and indirect scalar implicature but lack awareness of negative strengthening. We interpret these results by highlighting the role of processing complexity as well as pragmatic competence and proficiency. Overall, this study makes an empirical contribution to the field of L2 acquisition and adds to building a more encompassing understanding of mechanisms that are often assumed to be universal in language acquisition.