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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1419116
This article is part of the Research Topic Heritage Languages at the Crossroads: Cultural Contexts, Individual Differences, and Methodologies View all 15 articles

Beyond age: exploring ultimate attainment in heritage speakers and late L2 learners

Provisionally accepted
Leonarda Prela Leonarda Prela 1*Ewa Dabrowska Ewa Dabrowska 1Miquel Llompart Miquel Llompart 1,2
  • 1 Department of English and American Studies, Philosophische Fakultät und Theologische Fakultät. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany
  • 2 Faculty of Translation and Language Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

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

    According to the Critical Period Hypothesis, successful language learning is optimal during early childhood, whereas language learning outside of this time window is unsuccessful. In this respect, early language acquisition is viewed as convergent and reliable but late acquisition is not. The present study revisits the idea of a critical period by investigating the grammatical attainment of early bilinguals/heritage speakers (HSs), late second/foreign language (L2) learners, and comparable groups of monolinguals by testing Greek-English bilinguals in the two languages they speak by means of a grammaticality judgment task. Our findings show that in English, HSs performed on par with monolinguals, both groups surpassing the late L2 learners, who performed about 2 SDs below the HSs and the monolinguals. In Greek, late L2 learners and monolinguals exhibited comparable performance, contrasting sharply with the HSs' significantly lower proficiency, which was on average about 5 SDs below the late L2 learners and the monolinguals. Consequently, our results show that the performance gaps between HSs and Greek monolinguals/late L2 learners were more pronounced than the differences between late L2 learners and English monolinguals/HSs, suggesting that the early bilinguals' success in English may come at the expense of their heritage language (Greek). Furthermore, we observe substantially more individual variation within HSs in their heritage language than within the late L2 learners for their second language. Thus, testing bilinguals in both of their languages allows us to unveil the complexity of grammatical ultimate attainment and prompt a re-thinking of age as the major determining factor of (un)successful attainment.

    Keywords: bilingualism, ultimate attainment, heritage language acquisition, late bilinguals, grammar, Second Language Acquisition

    Received: 17 Apr 2024; Accepted: 23 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Prela, Dabrowska and Llompart. 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: Leonarda Prela, Department of English and American Studies, Philosophische Fakultät und Theologische Fakultät. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, 91054, Bavaria, Germany

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