Heritage speakers are those whose home language differs from the language of their
inhabited region. This can include native speakers who immigrate, or parents who chose to
use their non-native language at home for various reasons. One understudied area is the
impact of these two environments on language development. This study uses the MAIN
cat/dog storytelling task to examine the narrative abilities of 2 children from each
experimental condition: receiving native or non-native input. We analyse ...
Heritage speakers are those whose home language differs from the language of their
inhabited region. This can include native speakers who immigrate, or parents who chose to
use their non-native language at home for various reasons. One understudied area is the
impact of these two environments on language development. This study uses the MAIN
cat/dog storytelling task to examine the narrative abilities of 2 children from each
experimental condition: receiving native or non-native input. We analyse macro- and
microstructure, where macrostructure refers to larger story elements such as: setting,
complexity, and internal state terms, and microstructure refers to the language-specific uses
of formal linguistic features. The results indicate that speakers with a native parent
demonstrate a more advanced stage of acquisition in most measures, even when seemingly
similar errors are produced. These results support the need to further investigate the impact of
the various linguistic environments heritage speakers face.
+
