Variation in Heritage English in contact with Hebrew: An investigation of morpho-syntax and lexicon

By Sid Gordon (Bar-Ilan University) & Natalia Meir (Bar-Ilan University)

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Heritage Languages (HLs) show variation from the baseline (the language spoken in the country of origin or by first-generation immigrants dominant in that language). HL morpho-syntax has been extensively investigated and seems to be particularly fragile (Montrul 2016; Polinsky 2018; Albirini, Benmamoun, & Chakrani 2013), but it has been noted that insufficient attention has been paid to HL lexical aspects.  Also, the research is usually conducted in the context of English as the dominant societal language (SL), with less investigation of end-state proficiency where English is the HL.  

The innovation of the current study is in its comparison of morpho-syntactic and lexical abilities in adult HL-English (HL-E) speakers.  The mechanisms of cross-linguistic influence (the effect of the SL on the HL) and diminished input (of the HL) have traditionally been associated with observed variation in each of these domains. But because of English’s position as a ubiquitous international language, HL-E often receives considerably more reinforcement outside the home than other HLs.  Accordingly, this study will help to determine to what extent the mechanisms affecting variation apply to HL-E.  

Hebrew, the dominant language of the dyad in this study, is typologically distant from English (it has a richer nominal and verbal morphology and flexible word order).  Accordingly, a negative cross-linguistic influence on HL-E, at least in the morpho-syntactic domain, might be expected.    

Three groups of adult English-Hebrew bilinguals living in Israel participated in the study: HL-English speakers with two English-speaking parents (N=25), HL-English speakers with one English-speaking parent (N=25), and a baseline group of English-speaking immigrants (N=20).  All participants were exposed to English from birth, but the first two groups began acquiring Hebrew before age 5, while the baseline participants immigrated to Israel as adults.  The Boston Naming Test (Goodglass et al.,1983) was administered to measure lexical proficiency. An auditory Grammatical Judgment Test (GJT) measured morpho-syntactic proficiency.  Ungrammatical sentences included a variety of morpho-syntactic violations such as tense, predicate order, subject-verb agreement and use of articles. Details of the speakers’ linguistic exposure were recorded (e.g., AoO of exposure to English and Hebrew, sibling order, school environment) in order to examine possible predictors of proficiency in different domains.  

Results of the GJT demonstrated near-ceiling performance across the three groups (Baseline: M=93%, SD=5%; HLE-2P: M=94%, SD=4%; HLE-1P: M=91%, SD=7%), while differences were observed between the baseline and the two HL groups in the lexical domain (Baseline: M=90%, SD=5%; HLE-2P: M=70%, SD=14%; HLE-1P: M=65%, SD=14%).  

The current study suggests that, despite expectations to the contrary, morpho-syntactic variation is not the hallmark of all HLs, even when the bilingual dyad of HL and SL are morpho-syntactically distant. We bring novel evidence that vocabulary variations might be more salient in some HLs. We suggest that morpho-syntactic structures acquired in childhood, reinforced in the societal environment (formally in school, informally in public media), may be maintained at near-ceiling level because of the language’s ubiquity and relatively sparse morphology.  Exposure to diverse vocabulary is considerably less salient.

View slides here.

 
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Published: Wednesday, April 21, 2021