We investigate the situation of heritage speakers in Italian language classes in a federal state in Germany, taking three perspectives: (i) the micro-perspective of heritage speakers, mostly fluent in Italian but often bidialectal, (ii) the meso-perspective of the teachers who must interact adequately with them, (iii) the macro-perspective of the education policies that determine the curriculum. T

Models on L3/Ln acquisition differ with respect to how they envisage degree (holisticvs. selective transfer of the L1, L2 or both) and/or timing (initial stages vs. development) of howthe influence of source languages unfolds. This study uses EEG/ERPs to examine these models,bringing together two types of bilinguals: heritage speakers (HSs) (Italian-German, n = 15) comparedto adult L2 learners (L1

We investigate the acquisition of grammatical gender marking in German by monolingual children as well as German-Russian bilingual children who grow up in Germany as heritage speakers of Russian. We ask to what extent monolingual and bilingual children use phonological and/or structural cues to assign nominal gender, and to what extent they rely on lexical knowledge. To this end, we designed three

Previous research has shown that the two languages of early bilingual children can influence each other, depending on the linguistic property, while adult bilinguals predominantly show influence from the majority language to the minority (heritage) language. While this observed shift in influence patterns is probably related to a shift in dominance between early childhood and adulthood, there is l

There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage language grammars. In doing so, we focus on one of

Herein, we provide counterargumentation to some of Domínguez, Hicks, and Slabakova's claims that the term incomplete acquisition is conceptually necessary on theoretical grounds for describing the outcome grammars of heritage language bilingualism. Specifically, we clarify their claim that previous challenging of the term in our and others’ work is primarily based on a misconceived belief that inc

This paper discusses the interplay between acquisition and theory construction. It endeavors to show how a more direct and crucially bi-directional relationship between formal linguistic theory and the study of heritage language bilingualism can provide mutual benefit. It will be argued that data from acquisition—not exclusively but indeed especially from heritage language bilingualism—provide win

This study investigates perceived accent in the two early-acquired languages of 21 adult-aged bilinguals with Italian as the heritage language (HL) and German as the majority language (ML). We test the relative ability of ‘age of onset (AoO) in German’ (range = 0–6 years) and ‘Italian use’ to predict perceived nativeness in Italian and German.

According to the literature, German optionally allows a definite article with generic nominals, whereas other Germanic languages require a bare nominal (e.g., English Polar bears are white). This optionality makes German different from other Germanic languages and more similar to Romance languages, in which definite articles are obligatory with generic nominals in subject positions. Since article

The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and the case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate the relative vulnerability of both domains at once. Our results show that wh

We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguist

This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and English as L3. The study aims to identify the exten

Chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has emerged as a powerful imaging technique sensitive to tissue molecular composition, pH, and metabolic processes in situ. CEST MRI uniquely probes the physical exchange of protons between water and specific molecules within tissues, providing a window into physiological phenomena that remain invisible to standard MRI.

Inverse stochastic resonance (ISR) is a counterintuitive phenomenon where noise reduces the oscillation frequency of an oscillator to a minimum occurring at an intermediate noise intensity, and sometimes even to the complete absence of oscillations. In neuroscience, ISR was first experimentally verified with cerebellar Purkinje neurons [Buchin et al., PLOS Comput. Biol. 12, e1005000 (2016)]. These

Japanese citizens of all socioeconomic statuses have benefited from the national insurance system by receiving high-quality healthcare. However, the Japanese healthcare service is facing a severe financial crisis because of the increasing aging society and social security expenses. Many consultations raise medical expenditure and doctors' work overload, which is about to be regulated, but is quest

Determining how and why adult outcomes of heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism differ from monolinguals is difficult because it requires the reconstruction of developmental paths from end-state data. In an effort to address this issue, we examine HSs of Turkish in Germany at an early age of development (10–15 years old, n = 22), as well as age-matched monolingual controls in Turkey (n = 20) and Germ