Analysing narratives in Heritage English learning children with native or foreign speaker parents in Barcelona, Spain

Abstract

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.