What Heritage Speakers Teach Us About Language
Especially first language acquisition and how language changes throughout our lives.
This week, we’re taking a deeper look into heritage speakers and seeing what they can teach us about language acquisition. I hope this week will provide a good review of some of the topics we’ve looked at in the past, and also help us learn more about language and heritage speakers.
Language Changes Throughout Our Lives
Heritage speakers help us see that as our lives change, our language changes, too. For children who move countries at a very young age and never speak or hear their first language again, they might completely lose that language. But a really cool study shows that even if we—as speakers—forget the language—our brains don’t.
Researchers scanned the brains of babies who were born in China and were adopted and brought to live in French-speaking Canada. All of these babies had grown up into people who didn’t understand or speak their first language. The researchers used fMRI imaging on three groups of participants aged nine to 17:
Monolingual French speakers
French-Chinese bilinguals
Adoptees
And the adoptees’ brains looked a lot more like the bilingual brains than the monolingual brains. In other words, even though they operated in the world in what would appear to be a monolingual way, their brains remembered the Chinese sounds that they were exposed to as babies.
What this means in a practical sense (i.e. whether they’d learn Chinese faster than people who were never exposed to it as a baby) is unclear, but I love this study because it shows that language changes with you. And if you don’t remember the language you were exposed to as a baby, your body does.
There is a Relationship Between Age and Language Learning
We’ve talked about age and second language acquisition, and we discussed how the ultimate attainment of a language is influenced by age (but that anyone can learn a language to a high proficiency at any age). What we haven’t touched on is the relationship between age and first language acquisition.
Some Background on First Language Acquisition
Most children are surrounded by language as they grow up, and they eventually acquire the sounds and structures of the language they’re surrounded by. But, unfortunately, there are rare cases in which children grow up abused and not surrounded by language. Genie is one such case. She was a girl whose parents kept her locked up in a room tied to a potty chair in complete silence. She was kept this way until social services found her when she was thirteen years old.
The reason why Genie comes up in discussions of first language acquisition is that she started learning her first language around thirteen years old. And she was able to learn individual words, but she was never able to learn to string them together; she struggled with syntax. Based on Genie’s case (and a few others), there appears to be a critical period for learning language. If you don’t learn it before a certain age, then you won’t be able to learn it ever. That’s true for language overall.
Genie is an extreme case, but what happens to heritage speakers whose contact with their first language changes throughout their childhood—either from moving countries, moving school, or moving environments?
The development of the acquisition of their first language is usually affected. But not all parts. There’s a tendency that the last thing you acquire is the first thing you lose. For example, if the child goes to school in Spanish and moves to an English-speaking country (and school) right after learning the passive voice, if they start to lose their Spanish, they’ll lose the passive voice before losing something acquired much earlier, like knowing whether nouns are feminine or masculine.
Something which is acquired very early and that stays for the longest time is phonology, which has an early critical period. Babies are born with the ability to differentiate between every sound in the world, but by the age of six months, they already know the sounds of their first language—and that ability to differentiate between sounds gradually decreases. That’s why those Chinese adoptees could still recognize those Chinese sounds.
As heritage speakers grow older, they often have an accent similar to their family. In terms of grammar, though, their level of acquisition depends more on their circumstance (amount of exposure, schooling, etc.), as syntax is fully acquired later in life.
Back to Heritage Speakers
Let’s apply all of this to a made-up kid: Maria is six years old and she lives in Miami. Her parents speak only Spanish at home. She just started school last year and all of the classes are fully in English.
Maria has had all of her childhood input in Spanish. So when she opens her mouth to speak Spanish, she sounds quite similar to her parents: she uses their accent and dialect features. And she’s acquired a good amount of morphosyntax of Spanish. But as soon as she enters school, her life changes from being nearly all in Spanish to nearly all in English. With this change in input comes a change in development. Her English begins to develop really quickly, but her Spanish development slows down. By the time she finishes high school, she knows all about science, geography, anatomy, but she only knows about them in English. She continues to speak Spanish at home and speaks about family topics with great fluency and pronunciation. But when it comes to speaking about more specialized topics, she feels more confident speaking in English. As for the syntax of Spanish, she may not be familiar with the range of sentence structures seen in literature or with structures you usually only learn in school, like the passive voice.
Because she was surrounded by Spanish early on, she acquired Spanish phonology. Since she didn’t have school support, some syntax features might not have been fully acquired. From a linguistics perspective, her language acquisition of the two languages makes sense considering the amount of input and educational support in either language.
Conclusion
When given all the information, why people language the way they do usually makes sense. But most of the time, we don’t have all the information. We just have an accent or a few words to base our whole assumptions of how well someone languages. Or, in terms of heritage speakers, we know that their parents speak a language other than the community one. That information is not enough to know anything about how someone languages.
As listeners, I hope this message helps us be more empathetic. As speakers, I hope this message helps us realize there’s nothing wrong with the way we—or others—language.
Discussion
Thank you so much for reading! I would love to know your thoughts and questions on heritage speakers in the comments below!