Determining how and why adult outcomes of heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism differ from monolinguals is difficult because it requires the reconstruction of developmental paths from end-state data. In an effort to address this issue, we examine HSs of Turkish in Germany at an early age of development (10-15 years old, n=22), as well as age-matched monolingual controls in Turkey (n=20) and Germany ...

Spanish captures the difference between eventive and stative passives via an obligatory choice between two copula; verbal passives take the copula ser and adjectival passives take the copula estar. In this study, we compare and contrast US and Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish on their knowledge of this difference in relation to copula choice in Spanish. The backgrounds of the target groups ...

This study examines the mental representation of clitic object pronouns in English L2 Spanish speakers of beginning, intermediate and advanced proficiencies. We present the results of a scalar grammaticality judgment task, which examines knowledge of clitic placement in both Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verb constructions and non-ECM (finite and modal + infinitival) constructions. Our findings ...

This study considers the role of L1 phonological influence in L2 English past tense morphology production by native speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese. While these L1s share similar phonological restrictions on consonant cluster formation needed for English past tense morphology, differences arise in L1 syntax (only Mandarin lacks syntactic past) and L1 prosodic structure (only Japanese has ...

This paper integrates research on child simultaneous bilingual (2L1) acquisition more directly into the heritage language (HL) acquisition literature. The 2L1 literature mostly focuses on development in childhood, whereas heritage speakers (HSs) are often tested at an endstate in adulthood. However, insights from child 2L1 acquisition must be considered in HL acquisition theorizing precisely ...

This special issue is a testament to the recent burgeoning interest by theoretical linguists, language acquisitionists and teaching practitioners in the neuroscience of language. It offers a highly valuable, state-of-the-art overview of the neurophysiological methods that are currently being applied to questions in the field of second language (L2) acquisition, teaching and processing. Research in ...

Aims:<br> in this introduction we situate the seven articles in this special issue in terms of the connections between their themes and their individual contributions to the field of third language acquisition (L3A): new theoretical models, innovative methodologies, an epistemological commentary and new perspectives related to multilingual processing and cognitive function.<br> Approach:<br> we ...