Task effects and the yes-bias in heritage language bilingualism

ABSTRACT

This study investigated three key issues in heritage language (HL) research. Previous research shows HL speakers have an advantage on oral production tasks compared to L2 speakers who instead perform better on written tasks. Furthermore, both L2 and HL speakers are claimed to have a yes-bias towards retaining ungrammaticality in GJTs. Finally, the morphological domain has been shown to be as problematic for HL as L2 speakers but research in lesser-known languages is needed. Adult L1, L2, and HL speakers of Italian were compared on an oral priming task and timed GJT. Accuracy and response times were elicited from the latter test. The forms investigated were object and si-passive pronouns which lack corresponding forms in Swedish, the dominant language of the bilingual groups. Mixed effect regression was modelled to accuracy on the priming and GJT and response time data from the GJT. In contrast, a d-prime analysis was used to measure the degree of sensitivity to grammaticality and bias towards correct and incorrect answers in the GJT. Overall, the two bilingual groups performed quite similarly across the measures tested. All three groups show high sensitivity to grammaticality and a very similar bias for yes-answers on both grammatical and ungrammatical items.

KEYWORDS:

• Tasks effects
• yes-bias
• heritage language bilingualism

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the editor, Li Wei, for his work in the process of publishing this article. We are also very grateful to the reviewers for their helpful and detailed comments which have significantly helped us strengthen the content of our paper. We also would like to acknowledge help from a grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. number: PID2021-122127NB-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. We would also like to thank Marco Berton for his help with the task design. Any remaining errors are solely ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See arguments in Kupisch and Rothman (2018, 6) that the baseline should instead be composed of a HL group with the opposite dominance patterns.

2 We acknowledge the body of literature on L2 research in this domain is far wider than presented. Because the focus of the present study is on differences between HLSs and L2Ss, the literature review was limited to this matter.

3 We would like to thank Tania Kupisch for lending us the cloze test.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesco Romano

Francesco Romano is Associate Professor in Second Language Acquisition. His areas of interest are L2 and heritage language acquisition of morphosyntax across a number of languages, including Swedish, English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish. He is currently developing a new tool for measuring language processing in native and non-native speakers of English as well as investigating the role of typological similarity, age of onset, and syntactic complexity in heritage language speakers.

Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes

Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes is a Professor in Spanish linguistics at the University of the Balearic Islands and has headed multiple projects on the acquisition of various phenomena on Spanish language including, but not limited to, the acquisition of ser/estar, tense and mood, differential object marking, object omission, deixis all funded by the British Academy, Art and Humanities Research Council, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and more recently by the European Union research foundation under the Horizon2020. He has authored and co-authored numerous journal articles, book chapters and books, published by various international publishers and in high impact journals. He has organized many professional meetings and has been a participant in many professional conferences.