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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Bilingualism
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1419563
This article is part of the Research Topic Heritage Languages at the Crossroads: Cultural Contexts, Individual Differences, and Methodologies View all 18 articles

Bilingual acquisition during school years: predictors of achievement in the societal and heritage language.

Provisionally accepted
Magdalena Grose-Hodge Magdalena Grose-Hodge *Ewa Dabrowska Ewa Dabrowska
  • University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    There are vast individual differences in heritage bilinguals' linguistic skills. It is not clear, however, to what extent this variation can be attributed to experience, cognitive ability or motivation. This study investigates factors influencing the acquisition of both Polish (HL=Heritage Language) and English (SocL=Societal Language) of school-age children, examining the role of motivation, linguistic experience, and language aptitude. We collected and analysed speech samples from 7-to 12-year-old participants (n=78) residing in the UK to derive linguistic measures of fluency, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity in both languages. Additionally, a receptive grammar test was administered. Independent variables were obtained via parental questionnaires, a motivation survey and a language aptitude test. To identify predictors of heritage bilingual acquisition, we conducted least squares linear regression analyses for each language area and applied backward stepwise selection to reduce the models. Results show that predictors differ between languages and linguistic areas. Our findings highlight the role of language aptitude in bilingual development, challenge assumptions that motivation to use HL might detract from SocL development, and suggest that HL acquisition can support, rather than hinder, societal language development, as bilingual children draw on their metalinguistic awareness and cognitive skills across both languages.

    Keywords: bilingualism, heritage language acquisition, predictors of linguistic outcome, Aptitude, Motivation, input

    Received: 18 Apr 2024; Accepted: 05 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Grose-Hodge and Dabrowska. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Magdalena Grose-Hodge, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

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