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Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee children (N = 119) recently arrived in Canada using a sentence repetition task. Regression analyses showed that a partially overlapping set of child-level (input and cognitive skills) and language-level (syntactic structure) factors accounted for performance in each language. HL performance was particularly sensitive to language, cognitive, and input variables indexing cumulative HL exposure. L2 performance, however, was sensitive to cognitive and environmental variables indexing current and cumulative L2 use. Finally, despite stronger performance in Arabic than in English, results revealed interdependence between the two languages, indicating that participants with stronger syntactic abilities in their HL tended to have stronger syntactic abilities in their emerging L2.

Introduction: This study on child HL (heritage language) speakers of Mandarin examines the associations between parental characteristics (attitudes and proficiency), children's HL use (at home and through schooling), and children's HL outcomes (in vocabulary and simple syntax). Methods: Forty-seven Mandarin-English bilingual children of Chinese heritage (mean age: 10.5; age range: 6.8-16.2) residing in Western Canada participated in the study. All children were second-generation immigrants, and received one of three types of schooling. There were 11 children who attended English- only schools (English school group), 21 who attended English-only schools but also after-school heritage Mandarin classes (Heritage school group), and 15 who attended English-Mandarin bilingual schools (Bilingual school group). The children were administered two tasks: a picture-naming task targeting Mandarin vocabulary (LITMUS-CLT) and an experimental elicitation task targeting Mandarin wh-interrogative sentences (an early-acquired structure). Parents were administered a questionnaire about home language environment, attitudes toward Mandarin transmission, and their children's schooling choices. Results: Results showed that positive parental attitudes and lower parental proficiency in English were associated with more Mandarin use at home. More Mandarin use at home, in turn, was associated with larger vocabularies and more accurate production of interrogatives. By contrast, school type was only associated with vocabulary and not syntax: the Bilingual school group had larger vocabularies than the English school group. Discussion: Overall, these results show how parental characteristics may influence input factors, which in turn may differentially affect the acquisition of vocabulary vs. early-acquired syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to elicit subject placement in wide focus and embedded interrogative contexts, where postverbal subjects are preferred/required in the monolingual variety. Results gave rise to two main conclusions: first, the parental input received by heritage children may be qualitatively different from the parental input received by monolingual children, in that it contains a higher rate of deviant preverbal subjects. Second, parental input quality in addition to quantity may affect the outcome of heritage language acquisition, in that children producing a higher rate of preverbal subjects had parents whose Greek input was not only quantitatively reduced, but also richer in preverbal subjects.

A recurring question in the literature of heritage language acquisition, and more generally of bilingual acquisition, is whether all linguistic domains are sensitive to input reduction and to cross-linguistic influence and to what extent. According to the Interface Hypothesis, morphosyntactic phenomena regulated by discourse-pragmatic conditions are more likely to lead to non-native outcomes than strictly syntactic aspects of the language (Sorace, 2011). To test this hypothesis, we examined subject realization and placement in Greek-English bilingual children learning Greek as a heritage language in North America and investigated whether the amount of heritage language use can predict their performance in syntax-discourse and narrow syntactic contexts. Results indicated two deviations from the Interface Hypothesis: First, subject realization (a syntax-discourse phenomenon) was found to be largely unproblematic. Second, subject placement was affected not only in syntax-discourse structures but also in narrow syntactic structures, though to a lesser degree, suggesting that the association between the interface status of subject placement and its sensitivity to heritage language use among children heritage speakers is gradient rather than categorical.

Aims: We investigated: (1) whether differences in accuracy between heritage speakers (HS) and monolingual speakers (MS) signal differences in the path or merely in the rate of language development, and (2) whether, independently of these differences, HS become more accurate as they grow older. Methods: Using an elicitation task, we collected data from three groups of speakers of Greek: HS in the United States and Canada (78–226 months), MS of the same age (77–177 months), and younger MS (42–69 months). In terms of structures, we focused on two phenomena that are encoded differently in Greek and English: subject/object form in reference maintenance contexts and subject placement in embedded wh -dependencies. Data and Analysis: Data were analyzed with mixed-effects logistic regression models. Findings: We found that the heritage group had a lower accuracy and produced different error patterns than both monolingual groups. Specifically, only the heritage group produced non-felicitous lexical subjects/objects in reference maintenance contexts and ungrammatical preverbal subjects in embedded wh -structures. Accuracy, though, increased with age. Furthermore, current amount of heritage language (HL) input and generation, which were included as covariates, emerged as significant predictors in some or all of the conditions. Originality: The inclusion of a younger monolingual group helped us determine whether the different patterns observed in the language of HS are also attested in the language of MS at earlier developmental stages. The inclusion of a wide age range helped us determine whether, independently of differences in the path/rate of development, HS become more accurate as they grow older and accumulate the necessary amount of HL input. Implications: HS may go through developmental stages not attested in L1 acquisition. However, differences in developmental stages do not necessarily entail differences in the outcome of language acquisition. HS' accuracy may continue to increase, provided that they continue using their HL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]