Andreou, M., Dosi, I., Papadopoulou, D., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2020). Heritage and non-heritage bilinguals: The role of biliteracy and bilingual education. In B. Brehmer & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Lost in transmission: The role of attrition and input in heritage language development (Studies in Bilingualism 59) (pp. 171–196). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Andreou, M., Knopp, E., Bongartz, C., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2015). Character reference in Greek-German bilingual children’s narratives. In L. Roberts, K. McManus, N. Vanek, & D. Trenkic (Eds.), EUROSLA Yearbook 15 (pp. 1–40). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Benmamoun, E., Montrul, S., & Polinsky, M. (2013). Heritage languages and their speakers: opportunities and challenges for linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics, 39, 129–181.

Daskalaki, E., Chondrogianni, V., Blom, E., Argyri, F., & Paradis, J. (2019). Input effects across domains: The case of Greek subjects in child heritage language. Second Language Research, 35(3), 421–445.

Dosi, I., & Papadopoulou, D. (2020). The role of educational setting in the development of verbal aspect and executive functions: evidence from Greek-German bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23(8), 964–980.

Gavriilidou, Z., & Mitits, L. (2021). The socio-linguistic profiles, identities, and educational needs of Greek heritage language speakers in Chicago. Journal of Language and Education, 7(1), 80–97.

Kaltsa, M., Tsimpli, I.M., & Rothman, J. (2015). Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: Evidence from pronominal resolution. Lingua, 164(2), 266–288.

Montrul, S. (2016). Heritage language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paspali, A. Karkaletsou, F. & Alexiadou, A. (2022a). When morphology is not enough: Structural representations in the acquisition and processing of voice in monolingual and bilingual children. Studies in Greek Linguistics, 41, 185–198.

Paspali, A., Rizou, V., & Alexiadou, A. (2022b). Aspect in heritage Greek: Evidence from elicited production and online judgments. Applied Psycholinguistics, 43(2), 301–332.

Rothman, J., & Treffers-Daller, J. (2014). A prolegomenon to the construct of then native speaker: Heritage speaker bilinguals are natives too! Applied Linguistics, 35, 93–98.

Scontras, G., Fuchs, Z., & Polinsky, M. (2015). Heritage language and linguistic theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 6,1545.

Vicky Chondrogianni¹ & Evangelia Daskalaki^2
1University of Edinburgh, ²University of Alberta
v.chondrogianni@ed.ac.uk, daskalak@ualberta.ca

Several studies have examined sources of individual differences in child heritage speakers (HC) (e.g., Paradis, 2023). This is because HC display great variability in their rate of acquisition and the level of heritage language (HL) attainment. In this talk, we focus on child-external proximal factors, that is factors that directly affect HL outcomes, such as HL use and richness of HL activities in the heritage child’s country of residence, as well as on the children’s migration generation, a distal factor that may shape proximal factors. For example, children’s HL use may change as a function of their migration generation. Additionally, we examine how proximal factors related to the HC’s re-immersion to the heritage language through visits to country of origin, or visits of speakers from the country of origin may modulate HL outcomes.

Sixty Greek heritage children and teenagers aged between 6- and 18-years-old residing in New York City and in Western Canada with English as the ML were tested on a lexical naming task targeting vocabulary and on a sentence completion task targeting syntactically (Embedded Interrogatives/EI) or pragmatically (Wide Focus/WF) conditioned subject placement (Ex.1a-b). In EI, preverbal subjects are ungrammatical in Greek, whereas in WF, preverbal subjects are simply dispreferred (Daskalaki et al., 2019). Information about HC’s immigration generation and proximal factors was measured using a parental questionnaire (ALEQ-heritage, Daskalaki et al., 2019). HC belonged to three generations: Second-generation HC, whose parents were first generation immigrants to the US or Canada, mixed-generation HC, whose parents belonged to either first- or second-generation speakers, and third-generation HC, whose parents were second-generation heritage speakers.

HC’s generation was a significant predictor of HL outcomes, with the third-generation HC performing more poorly than the second and mixed generations, who did not differ from each other on the lexical naming task and on EI. Second-generation HC outperformed mixed-generation HC in the WF condition. Regarding proximal factors, the more Greek was currently used in the home, the better HC performed on the lexical task across generations. Visits to the country of origin were stronger predictors than amount of current HL use in the country of residence. Visits to and from the country of origin explained most of the variance in subject placement, albeit differentially for the EI and the WF conditions.

This study shows that HL use in the country of residence is important for HL development, but that HL use changes as a function of the child’s generation. The change in HL use coupled with changes in input quality (Daskalaki et al., 2020) may work in tandem to modulate HL acquisition outcomes. At the same time, HC’s improved performance, even on the vulnerable WF condition (Daskalaki et al. 2019, 2020), as a function of visits to and from the country of origin highlights the importance for HL maintenance of both diversity of and exposure to a variety spoken by more speakers and in different contexts (Place & Hoff, 2011).

Zoe Gavriilidou & Ifigeneia Dosi
Democritus University of Thrace
zoegab@otenet.gr, idosi@helit.duth.gr

The present corpus-based study investigates the oral narrative skills in Greek-American heritage speakers in both of their languages. Heritage speakers (HSs) are simultaneous, or sequential, bilinguals who have been exposed to a particular language in childhood but did not fully acquire it because another language became dominant (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007). Heritage Languages refer to languages of diaspora communities, with a history of migration. Immigrants are first language (L1) attriters, their children constitute the first generation of HSs and their grandchildren constitute the 2nd generation of HSs (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007). HSs grow up acquiring their parents’ L1, which is often attritted. Once they start schooling, the language of the host country becomes dominant (Karatsareas, 2018). Their heritage language is supported predominately orally, while literacy falls by the wayside. Differences in linguistic abilities of HS are often observed in lexical and more complex morphosyntactic aspects (Andreou et al., 2020; Daskalaki et al. 2018; Gavriilidou & Mitits, 2021; Kaltsa et al., 2015; Paspali, 2019). They produce grammars and vocabularies characterized by innovations (Gavriilidou & Mitits, 2020; Karatsareas, 2018). Most of the studies have tested only the heritage language of these speakers. The present study addressing this issue investigates narrative skills (macrostructure & microstructure) in both Greek and English in thirty-one (31) oral narratives from the Greek Heritage Language Corpus (GHLC; Gavriilidou et al., 2019). Based on So et al. (2018) narratives were coded for their story grammar, cohesion, length, lexical breadth and syntactic complexity in both languages and outcomes will be compared. The findings are also discussed considering a background questionnaire administered to the participants about their input and literacy practices.

References

Andreou, M., Dosi, I., Papadopoulou, D., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2020). Heritage and non-heritage bilinguals: The role of biliteracy and bilingual education. In B. Brehmer & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Lost in transmission: The role of attrition and input in heritage language development (Studies in Bilingualism 59) (pp. 171–196). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Daskalaki, E., Chondrogianni, V., Blom, E., Argyri, F., & Paradis, J. (2018). Input effects across domains: The case of Greek subjects in child heritage language. Second Language Research, 35(3), 421–445.

Di Pisa G., Kubota M., Rothman J., & Marinis T. (2022). Effects of markedness in gender processing in Italian as a heritage language: A speed accuracy tradeoff. Frontiers in Psychology, 13,965885.

Gavriilidou, Z., & Mitits, L. (2020). Loanblends in the speech of Greek heritage speakers: A corpus-based lexicological approach. In Z. Gavriilidou, M. Mitsiaki, & A. Fliatouras (Eds.), Lexicography for inclusion: Proceedings of the 19th EURALEX International Congress (vol. 1, pp. 352–360). Democritus University of Thrace.

Gavriilidou, Z., & Mitits, L. (2021). The socio-linguistic profiles, identities, and educational needs of Greek heritage language speakers in Chicago. Journal of Language and Education, 7(1), 80–97.

Gavriilidou, Z., Mitits, L., Mavromatidou, S., Chadjipapa, E., & Dourou, C. (2019). The compilation of Greek heritage language corpus (GHLC): A language resource for spoken Greek by Greek communities in the U.S. and Russia. European Journal of Language Studies, 6(1).

Kaltsa, M., Tsimpli, I. M., & Rothman, J. (2015). Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: evidence from pronominal resolution. Lingua, 164(B), 266–288.

Karatsareas, P. (2018). Attitudes towards Cypriot Greek and standard Modern Greek in London's Greek-Cypriot community. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(4), 412–428.

Paspali, A. (2019). Gender agreement in native and heritage Greek: An attraction study [Doctoral dissertation]. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Polinsky, M,. & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In the 'wild' and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368–395.

So, Y., Sohn, S. S., & Kim, J. (2018). An analysis of Korean heritage learners’ writing across different discourse types. Heritage Language Journal, 15(3), 319–340.

Angelika Golegos & Theodoros Marinis
University of Konstanz
angelika.golegos@uni-konstanz.de, t.marinis@uni-konstanz.de

Research on Greek as a heritage language (HL) is a relatively new field of interest. To date, few studies have investigated children growing up in Germany with Greek as a HL and most of them addressed the development of narrative skills in terms of reference production. Results show that children often prefer nominal phrases over null pronouns for subject reference, a pattern that is not found to the same extent in monolingual peers (Andreou et al., 2015; Torregrossa et al., 2021). However, no studies have investigated reference processing. Our study fills this gap by investigating the processing of pronoun ambiguity in Greek as a HL in primary school children living in Germany.

Research with monolingual Greek adults show that null pronouns are preferably associated with the discourse subject, while overt pronouns are preferably associated with the discourse object (Miltsakaki, 2007). This is not always the case in children. Papadopoulou et al. (2015) showed that 6-to-7 year old children prefer a subject referent when encountering a null pronoun, whereas there is no clear object preference when encountering an overt pronoun. However, Papadopoulou et al. (2015) used a self-paced listening task that presents sentences segmented. This is unlike how we listen to sentences in real life. To improve ecological validity the present study presents sentences unsegmented.

The present study investigates 6-to-8 year old children with Greek as a HL and German as the majority language living in Germany. The data collection is ongoing. The target number of participants is 40 (20 per school grade). In an online picture selection task, participants listen to sentences that contain two competing characters, followed by an ambiguous third-person singular masculine pronoun (pro, aftos), see Example (1).

1)  Ο πιλότος_j θέλει να ζωγραφίσει τον κτηνίατρο_k με ένα μικρό πινέλο. Αλλά pro_j / αυτός_k είναι πολύ κουρασμένος.
The pilot_j wants to draw the vet_k with a small brush. But pro_j / he_k is very tired.
‘The pilot wants to draw the vet with a small brush. But he is very tired.’
While listening to the sentences, participants see three images on the screen, representing the competing subject and object as well as a distractor. After the end of the sentences, participants are asked a comprehension question that forces them to interpret the pronoun towards one of the two characters. Responses are given by clicking on the image of the respective character.

Based on previous literature we expect children with Greek as a HL to resolve null pronouns towards subjects. Furthermore, 8-year-old children should resolve overt pronouns in an adult-like manner, namely towards the object, while 6–year-olds may show an unclear preference in line with Papadopoulou et al. (2015).

References

Andreou, M., Knopp, E., Bongartz, C., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2015). Character reference in Greek- German bilingual children’s narratives. EUROSLA Yearbook 15, 1–40.

Miltsakaki, E. (2007). A rethink of the relationship between salience and anaphora resolution. In A. Branco, T. McEnery, R. Mitkov, & F. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC 2007). Centro de Linguística de Universidade do Porto, Porto.

Papadopoulou, D., Peristeri, E., Plemonou, E., Marinis, T., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2015). Pronoun ambiguity resolution in Greek: Evidence from monolingual adults and children. Lingua, 155, 98–120.

Torregrossa, J., Andreou, M., Bongartz, C., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2021). Bilingual acquisition of reference: The role of language experience, executive functions and cross-linguistic effects. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24, 694–706.

Kalliopi Katsika¹, Kateryna Iefremenko², Annika Labrenz³,
Christoph Schroeder³, Shanley Allen^1
1RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, ²Universität Potsdam, ³Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin katsika@rptu.de, iefremenko@uni-potsdam.de, annika.labrenz@hu-berlin.de,
christoph.schroeder.iii@uni-potsdam.de, allen@rptu.de

The dynamics of event relating have mostly been studied in child language development (Berman   & Slobin, 1994, Berman & Verhoeven, 2002), but much less so in language contact and heritage language (HL) research. HLs are defined as first languages (L1) and at the same time as non- dominant languages of the larger community (see Polinsky, 2018; Rothman, 2009; Tsehaye et al., 2021). This means that early on in the acquisition process, the L1 of heritage speakers (HSs) switches into being a non-dominant language. One of the repercussions of this switch is that HSs are believed to end up producing syntactically “simpler” structures in their HL compared to monolingual speakers (e.g. Polinsky, 2018). In this study, we investigate the extent to which this assumption holds by examining monolingual and HSs’ clause combining dynamics.

We conducted a corpus analysis of a subset of the RUEG corpus (https://hu.berlin/rueg- corpus). The RUEG corpus comprises majority and HL texts elicited according to the Language Situations Set-up (Wiese et al., 2021). Our analysis includes Greek and English texts produced by 24 Greek/English heritage speakers in the US, 24 monolingually raised speakers in the US, 24 monolingually raised Greek speakers in Greece, and Greek and German texts produced by 20 heritage Greek speakers in Germany, and 24 monolingually raised speakers in Germany. We analyzed the frequency of main (MC) and subordinate clauses (SC) in heritage and majority speakers’ texts, as well as the number of clauses per CU (“communication unit”), and we also analyzed types of connectivity in clausal boundaries.

Our results showed that the differences between monolingual and Greek HSs in the majority languages (English, German) were minimal. In contrast, Greek HSs produced fewer SCs than monolingual Greek speakers across all communicative situations. In addition, Greek HSs used significantly fewer embeddings per CU than monolingual Greek speakers. We thus indeed find decreased complexity in HSs’ event relating dynamics. A detailed analysis of connectivity types, however, showed that HSs have fully intact knowledge of subordinating conjunctions in Greek, which indicates that their syntactic competence remains intact independently of complexity in discourse.

References

Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Erlbaum.

Berman, R. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2002). Crosslinguistic perspectives on developing text production abilities in speech and writing. Written Language and Literacy, 5, 1–44.

Rothman, J. (2009). Understanding the nature and outcomes of early bilingualism: Romance languages as heritage languages. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13, 155–163.

Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge: CUP.

Tsehaye, W., Pashkova, T., Tracy, R., & Allen, S. E. M. (2021). Deconstructing the native speaker: Further evidence from heritage speakers for why this horse should be dead! Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 717352.

Wiese, H., Alexiadou, A., Allen, S., Bunk, O., Gagarina, N., et al. (2021). RUEG Corpus (Version 0.4.0) [Data set]. Zenodo.

Christos Makrodimitris & Petra Schulz
Goethe University Frankfurt
makrodimitris@em.uni-frankfurt.de, P.Schulz@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Heritage bilingual children acquire their heritage language (HL) from birth and are exposed to the societal language simultaneously or sequentially, during childhood (Kupisch & Rothman, 2018). Although the HL is an L1, HL development may be less dependent on chronological age compared to monolingual development, due to the influence of other child-internal and child- external factors (Chondrogianni & Schwarz, 2020; Paradis, 2023). Age of onset of bilingualism (AoO) is argued to play a crucial role: a higher AoO should boost HL development, because the initial period of exclusive HL exposure allows the learner to stabilize her HL abilities (Kupisch, 2019). This AoO-effect may not be across the board, however: simple structures, which require less extensive exposure and are mastered early, may be less affected than complex structures, which are acquired later (Armon-Lotem et al., 2021).

The present study addresses these assumptions by examining the role of chronological age for the morpho-syntactic abilities of monolingual and HL Greek children, and the role of AoO for HL children’s performance with simple and complex structures. Morpho-syntactic abilities were assessed via the Greek LITMUS sentence repetition task (SRT; Chondrogianni et al., 2013), which consists of 32 sentences, matched for length and targeting eight structures (SVO, clitics, negation, coordination, complement clauses, temporal and concessive adverbial clauses, object wh-questions, subject and object relative clauses). Five structures (SVO, clitics, negation, coordination, complement clauses) are early acquired and can be viewed as simple, whereas three structures (adverbial clauses, object wh-questions, relative clauses) are mastered after age 4 and are regarded as complex (e.g., Makrodimitris & Schulz, 2021).

We tested 52 HL Greek children in Germany (age: 6;0–12;8, AoO: 0;0–6;9) and 60 monolingual children (age: 6;1–11;11) (no difference in age: p=0.881). Children’s responses were rated for correct use of the target structure (correct use: 1 point, incorrect use: 0 points; Marinis & Armon-Lotem, 2015). To control for memory effects on SRT-performance (Klem et al., 2015), children completed a forward digit-recall task. Monolinguals outperformed their HL peers in simple (MMON=81.6%, MHL=53.4%, p<0.001) and complex structures (MMON= 84.7%, MHL=57.5%, p<0.001). Notably, monolinguals’ performance was higher for complex than for simple structures (p=0.053), while HL children’s performance for simple and complex structures did not differ (p=0.530). The overall SRT-score of monolinguals correlated strongly with age (r=0.620), p<0.001) and digit-recall score (r=0.637, p|z|)=0.026; digit-recall: Estimate=0.814, Pr (>|z|)<0.001). In the HL group, the overall SRT-score correlated weakly with age (r=0.243, p=0.041), moderately with digit-recall (r=0.404, p=0.001), and strongly with AoO (r=0.637, p|z|)|z|)=0.017), but not by age (Estimate=-0.145, Pr (>|z|)=0.560). Separate GLMMs for simple and complex structures revealed the same effects as the full model. Our results suggest that–between ages 6 and 12–AoO rather than chronological age is a driving force in HL acquisition: a later exposure to the societal language is beneficial for HL morpho-syntactic development. Unexpectedly, the effect of AoO was not mediated by complexity. This may be due to the test design (all sentences were long enough to disallow mere copying, which made even simple structures challenging), or due to the specific age range (ages 6 to 12). More research on younger HL children with different tasks should address the issue of complexity.

References

Armon-Lotem, S., Rose, K., & Altman, C. (2021). The development of English as a heritage language: The role of chronological age and age of onset of bilingualism. First Language, 41(1), 67–89.

Chondrogianni, V., Andreou, M., Nerantzini, M., Varlokosta, S., & Tsimpli, I.‑M. (2013). The Greek sentence repetition task. COST Action IS0804.

Chondrogianni, V., & Schwartz, R. G. (2020). Case marking and word order in Greek heritage children. Journal of Child Language, 47(4), 766–795.

Klem, M., Melby-Lervåg, M., Hagtvet, B., Lyster, S.‑A. H., Gustafsson, J.‑E., & Hulme, C. (2015). Sentence repetition is a measure of children's language skills rather than working memory limitations. Developmental Science, 18(1), 146–154.

Kupisch, T. (2019). 2L1 simultaneous bilinguals as heritage speakers. In M. S. Schmid & B. Köpke (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language attrition (pp. 457–469). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kupisch, T., & Rothman, J. (2018). Terminology matters! Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(5), 564–582.

Makrodimitris, C., & Schulz, P. (2021). Does timing in acquisition modulate heritage children’s language abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS sentence repetition task. Languages, 6: 49.

Marinis, T., & Armon-Lotem, S. (2015). Sentence repetition. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. d. Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 95–121). Bristol/Buffalo/Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

Paradis, J. (2023). Sources of individual differences in the dual language development of heritage bilinguals. Journal of Child Language, 1–25.

Anastasia Paspali¹ & Μaria Andreou^2
1Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, ²University of Peloponnese
paspalia@lit.auth.gr, m.andreou@go.uop.gr

Speech rate (as mostly measured in words/minute) is considered a reliable measure of lexical proficiency across various groups, e.g., first (L1) and second language (L2) child and adult learners (de Jong et al., 2015; Kagan & Friedman, 2003) as well as bilinguals (Daller et al., 2011) including Heritage Speakers (HSs) (Petersen et al., 2021; Polinsky, 2008) and atypical populations (Potagas et al., 2022). Focusing on HSs, studies show that HSs exhibit lower speech rate in their heritage language due to the successively reduced use and input as well as the prevalent use of the majority language of the society (Aalbrese et al., 2019; Irizari van Suchtelen, 2016; Polinsky, 2008). Crucially, it has recently been reported that speech rate is a valid proxy for heritage language proficiency (Nagy & Brook, 2020). Speech rate has not been explored in Greek heritage speakers and this study aims to address this gap. Interestingly, first-generation Greek immigrants in Germany, who grew up with abundant use and exposure in their L1-Greek (as opposed to second-/third-generation immigrants) before moving to the host country, do not significantly differ from the monolingual norm in terms of their Greek speech rate (Klein & Agathopoulou, 2023). Aim and Objectives: The present study is the first one which aims to measure speech rate in adult and child heritage speakers of Greek and to explore the role of individual variation. Research Question: Do child and adult Greek heritage speakers exhibit significantly lower speech rate in their heritage language compared to the monolingual control groups due to reduced input and use? Participants: 25 Greek-German children (13 boys, mean age: 11;3 years) and 25 Greek monolingual children (11 boys, mean age: 11;1, range: 10;11-11;05), 52 Greek-German adults (19 males, mean age: 21;6, range: 19-27) and 52 Greek monolingual adults (23 males, mean age: 23;2, range: 18-33) participated in the present study. The bilingual children were exposed to German early (age of onset: 2;9, range: 0-8) and they attended a Greek supplementary school (weak maintenance type of bilingual of setting) in Cologne (4h/week) outside the regular school hours of their formal German education. The bilingual adults were second-generation immigrants exposed to German early (age of onset: 1;7, range: 0-4). Half of them had attended German-Greek bilingual primary schools in which half of the courses were taught in Greek, but they switched to German monolingual schools (secondary and high schools) at higher levels of education. Method: To measure speech rate in oral narrations, one story of the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI) with 13 pictures was employed for the child participants (Schneider & Dubé, 2005). For the adult participants, the Cat napping Story (link) with Tom & Jerry (available on YouTube) was employed because a more demanding task was required for them due to their greater working memory capacity compared to children. Participants first watched the story twice and then they were asked to narrate it in Greek while they were recorded. Both children’s and adults’ stories were animated and did not include lexical content. Participants’ demographic data were also elicited through detailed questionnaires. Finally, the Backwards Digit Recall task (AWMA, Alloway 2007) was used to measure participants’ verbal working memory. Predictions: If the heritage groups exhibit lower speech rate, a main effect of Language Group (bilinguals vs. monolinguals) is predicted for both children and adults compared to their age equivalent groups. The data analysis is now in progress and will have been completed by the time of the workshop. The results will be discussed in light of the above predictions and previous literature about the lexical abilities of heritage speakers. Finally, the (potential) effect of language background variables and working memory on speech rate will be explored and presented.