Seventh Heritage Language Research Institute

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The ‘Heritage Advantage'—Examples from Korean

It is widely acknowledged that heritage learners have at best a partial mastery of their family’s home language. Nonetheless, questions arise as to whether what is known might serve as an advantageous foundation for learning what is missing. One way to investigate this matter is compare the performance of heritage language learners with that of monolingual language learners and/or second language learners on phenomena which involve substantial subtlety and whose acquisition does not rely on obvious cues from the input or from instruction. In this presentation, I will consider four such phenomena: the place of articulation of Korean coronals, the use of case markers to signal subtle contrasts in information structure, a sensitivity to scope relations in certain unusual patterns of negation, and the ability to learn an extremely rare use of the plural marker to which even monolingual children are insensitive for many years. For each phenomenon, I will report on evidence that points to an aptitude that appears to place heritage learners on or near the level of child monolingual native speakers.