Third Annual Heritage Language Research Institute Introductory remarks Maria Polinsky

Third Annual Heritage Language Research Institute

Introductory remarksMaria Polinsky

WELCOME

• Third annual event• More participation by graduate students and

educators• More languages represented

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

• DOE and UCLA Russian Flagship Program• Olga Kagan• Kathleen Dillon• Abbas Benmamoun and Silvina Montrul• Kathryn Paul, Susie Bauckus, Agazit Abate,

Matthew Giangrande• Local organizers

THIS PRESENTATION

• Research challenges posed by heritage languages:– WHERE WE HAVE BEEN– WHERE WE MIGHT WANT TO GO NEXT

• Goals of this Institute (and beyond)

RESEARCH CHALLENGES POSED BY HERITAGE LANGUAGES

HERITAGE LANGUAGE RESEARCH: A QUICK LOOK BACK

• Early steps: general understanding of the phenomenon and critical differentiation of categories:– Heritage language in the narrow sense of the word– Variance among heritage speakers, different

subtypes of speakers– Structural and developmental parallels across

different heritage languages– Data collection (still needed—will return to this

later)

HERITAGE LANGUAGE RESEARCH: A QUICK LOOK BACK

• Early steps: general understanding of the phenomenon and critical differentiation of categories

• Next steps: what is there and what is missing in a typical heritage language?

On the positive side On the negative side

Phonetic competenceImpressive comprehensionReasonable pragmatics

Age-appropriate grammarAmbiguity resolutionComplexityvocabulary

RESEARCH CHALLENGES

• Early steps: general understanding of the phenomenon and critical differentiation of categories

• Next step: what is there and what is missing?• Moving forward: why are certain things

missing?• Once we know why certain things are missing

it becomes easier to put them back in place, for example, in the classroom

SOME THOUGHTS ON WHAT MAY BE MISSING AND WHY

BY WAY OF EXERCISE

• The woman who was seen by my neighbor that stopped by last night speaks Spanish– The woman stopped by– The neighbor stopped by

BY WAY OF EXERCISE


• La donna fermata dalla vicina che e' venuta a farmi visita ieri parla spagnolo– The woman stopped by– The neighbor stopped by

BY WAY OF EXERCISE


• La donna fermata dal vicino che e' venuto a farmi visita ieri parla spagnolo– The woman stopped by– The neighbor stopped by

BY WAY OF EXERCISE

• La donna fermata dal vicino che e' venuto a farmi visita ieri parla spagnolo

– The neighbor stopped by

BY WAY OF EXERCISE


• La donna fermata dal vicino che e' venuta a farmi visita ieri parla spagnolo– The woman stopped by– The neighbor stopped by

BY WAY OF EXERCISE

• La donna fermata dal vicino che e' venuta a farmi visita ieri parla spagnolo

– The woman stopped by

WHAT WAS THIS ABOUT?

• Maintaining a long-distance dependency– Structure: recognizing an antecedent—gap

relationship– Memory: holding the antecedent in working

memory

• Admitting ambiguity and complexity– Resolving the ambiguity with the help from small

details

WHAT IS MISSING AND WHY

• What: Heritage speakers show recurrent deficits with complex and/or ambiguous structures

• Why: These deficits may appear as heritage speakers overlook small details

SMALL DETAILS

• Small things have a big role—the ending on the Italian participle was all that one needed to resolve the ambiguity

• Small things are functional elements that tie big things together

PROPOSAL

Heritage speakers don’t sweat the small stuff and pay dearly for that: • they have a relatively poor control of

morphology • which cascades and escalates into a series of

greater apparent deficits– such as problems with long-distance

dependencies, binding, or agreement

• Heritage speakers have difficulty noticing and producing light functional elements, which in turn leads to the appearance of significant deficits in the syntactic design of their language The deficits are both in production and comprehension

DO HERITAGE SPEAKERS PRODUCE MORPHOLOGY?

• Montrul and Bowles 2008, Montrul 2008: heritage speakers of Spanish have a problem with a personal

• They do not seem to have a problem with bigger prepositions and particles

DO HERITAGE SPEAKERS HEAR MORPHOLOGY?

Sekerina 2005: eye-tracking study of structural ambiguities in Russian monolinguals and heritage speakers


• Put the horse that’s on the plate in the box• Put the horse on the plate in the box


Položite lošadku na tarelku i v korobkuput horsey.

ACCon to the plate

and Into the box

Položite lošadku na tarelke v korobku

put horsey.ACC

on the plate Into the box


Heritage speakers’ adversaries: • Inflectional endings• Light connectors such as i, a, etc.


• Polinsky 2007: heritage speakers of Russian do not recognize gender agreement endings in adjective and ignore word-final gender cues on nouns; – the sensitivity deteriorates when the endings are

unstressed– end-stressed neuter nouns are preserved at about

70%, end-unstressed neuter nouns are reanalyzed as feminines

BELOW THE MORPHOLOGICAL BOTTLENECK

• Korean double nominative• Russian and Tongan relative clauses• Russian count forms

Korean double nominative

• Cascading effects: Korean double nominativeMinswu-ka chinku-ka khu-taMinswu-NOM friend-NOM big-DEC‘Minswu’s friends are tall.’

• The structure requires semantic (and syntactic) subordination:Minswu-uy chinku-ka khu-ta

M-GEN friend-NOM big-DEC

Korean double nominative

• Instead of interpreting the structure as subordinating, the subjects interpret it as coordinate (‘Minswu and friends are tall’), thus:

X-ka Y-ka X-uy Y-kaX-ka Y-ka X-kwa Y

• Similar reanalysis with the true genitive (less common)

Russian relative clauses

• Despite the appearance of overt morphology heritage speakers reanalyze relative clauses as subject relatives (Polinsky 2008):the people that my neighbor saw the people that saw my neighbor

But maybe they just assimilate this to the most common word order (SV) and treat the first noun as subject?

Tongan relative clauses

Tongan (Austronesian), VSO (alternative VOS)

‘The teacher is calling the boy.’

Tongan relative clauses

‘a e faiako ‘oku ne ui ‘a e tamasi’i

ABS DET teacher PRES RP call ABS DET boy

‘the teacher who is calling the boy’

‘a e tamasi’i ‘oku ui ‘e faiako

ABS DET boy PRES call ABS teacher

‘the boy whom the teacher is calling’

Subject relative

Object relative

Preliminary results for Tongan

• Adult speakers distinguish subject and object relatives easily; subject relatives are faster

• Heritage speakers (N=5) make errors favoring the subject relative interpretation; however,– subject relative clause is morphologically more

complex– word order differences should be a cue: relative

clauses look like SVO, they are not verb-initial

Morphology of counting

Russian count form: In Russian, the form of the noun used with numerals 2-4 looks like genitive singular—but is it?

• Native speakers: “Gen.sg.” is a special form which does not map to the underlying representation of gen. sg. (Xiang et al. submitted)

• Advanced heritage speakers: simplification of morphological distinctions, “Gen.sg.” is gen. sg. morphology is more shallow

Losing small stuff

• Inflectional morphology (“small stuff”) is difficult across a number of populations including heritage speakers

• Why?– Salience: they just don’t notice it– Lack of automatic access: they have no time to

process it and therefore ignore it

Consequences

• Inflectional morphology (“small stuff”) is difficult because it is not automatic

• Morphological deficit forces speakers into the easiest parsing available:– Default parsing (pragmatically plausible)• Usually works but breaks down under ambiguity….

– First pass parsing (subject and predicate division without further subdivisions)

First pass parsing

………..

Subjectt

VPt

DONE!

Consequences

• Morphological deficit forces speakers into the easier parsing available– Default parsing – First pass parsing

• This shallow parsing leads to the appearance of greater deficits in syntax– Outstanding question: are some deficits syntactic

in nature or can they all be attributed to morphology?

ARE HERITAGE LANGUAGES WITHOUT MORPHOLOGY SAFE?

Tamarine (Tammy) Tamasugarn

Free production: high fluency

Okay, everybody always thought like I grown up in States, but actually no. I was born in States, and when I was four I moved back to Thailand with parents and I grown up in Thailand. So I definitely am Thai. Everything, the culture, everything Thai. But I also know also American culture also because part of my family also in L.A.

Free production: high fluency

So I learn language and, you know, how, maybe you can tell from my speak. But I think it's great to know both of culture and, you know, adjust in your life and bring all the good stuff on each culture to improve your life and make your life happy. So I think that's a very good to learn for both culture, yeah.

A reporter asks

Q. As someone who has been on the tour for quite a long time and been at Wimbledon for so many years in a row, what sense of appreciation do you have at this sometimes seemingly inevitable march to a Williams sisters final, and what are your thoughts on when they play each other?

Tammy replies…

I think they been in many Grand Slam final against each other. You know, they're, both of them, you know, they're great players. They're working hard. You know, I admire their so much because they're working on the tour like really hard and very serious on their career. And, um, you know, for them to be in the final is like probably bored, huh? I don't know. Not really bored. But good for them anyway. So it's gonna be maybe, I don't know, I don't know, I couldn't say. But they're good players, yeah.

Q. Do you feel you competed well in that match?Um, yes, I, I think I'm, you know, go out there and, and

try the best I can’t. And, um, I think I, I was joking myself, I have so many breakpoints in the first set.

But, you know, Venus, in, you know, that kind of top players, you know, like defending champion, she don't give you any easy chance to use, so you have to make it. And, um, she served very well during the, during the breakpoints, so…what can I do? I, I play very…you know, I try the best I can today.

Q. Did you approach it any differently than your other matches against Venus?

Well, her, her game and her style is really hard because she have a very, very hard weapon, you know, big serve and big groundstrokes.

And, you know, today I try to be aggressive and step up, you know, and I think, um, part of the couple, many points that I, I tried, you know, tried to do in the good way.

But, um, only thing today, is like, it's her serve. I really, she served very well today, and... You know, like, I was like — when she's acing me many times, I was like, can I —probably next life I want to be tall as her, please, or something like that.

But it's just, yeah, it’s, it’s, she's, she’s serve very well today, yeah.

Some observations

• Damaged morphology• Missing functional elements• Multiple redundancies and repetitions• Short segments, no embeddings• Word order different from the baseline

• If Tammy is any indication, languages with little or no morphology also show attrition effects

IMMEDIATE NEEDS

• Needed: Studies of comprehension in morphologically poor languages

• Needed: Inventory of errors made by HL speakers of Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

• The morphology-syntax interface seems particularly fragile. What is the equivalent of this interface in languages without inflectional morphology?

• Are other interfaces fragile too?– If yes, which ones?– If no, what makes morphology special?

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

• What happens to morphology in the grammar of heritage languages:Does it go unnoticed? (the salience hypothesis)Does it get sacrificed to minimize processing costs?

(the automation hypothesis)

• How to separate memory effects from language effects?

PEDAGOGICAL CONSEQUENCES

Heritage speakers can benefit from enhanced morphological awareness:

• Morphology without moans• Lexical development without rote learning• Practicing ambiguities• Practicing linguistic awareness and possibly

word play

Sneaking morphology through the lexicon

Linguistic rationale:vocabulary knowledge correlates with

grammatical knowledge:• L1 learners (size of lexicon and MLU correlate

between ages 1;6 and 3;0 (Bates et al. 2003)• heritage speakers (Polinsky 1995, 2006)

Lexical proficiency, Russian HS

20

40

60

80

70.0 80.0 90.0

Vocabulary

Agreement

Correlation between lexical knowledge and control of grammatical agreement (r = .882)

Sneaking morphology through the lexicon

Pedagogical rationale:more words—more fun interactionmore words—more perception and language awareness (more in Olga’s presentation this afternoon)

GOALS OF THIS INSTITUTE

GENERAL GOALS FOR THIS WEEK

• Educating researchers: what is missing in HL research?

• Educating educators: what works and what does not work in HL relearning?

BUZZWORDS FOR THIS WEEK

Heritage speakers relearn SMALL things by learning BIGGER things

My heritage speakers are NOT like your heritage speakers

L L

L L

HL HL

HL HL

DISCUSSION POINTS FOR THIS WEEK

• Commonalities across different heritage languages

• Comparison between L2 learners and heritage speakers

• Research and teaching methodologies for specific levels of heritage classrooms

• Development of appropriate instructional materials for heritage speakers

• Development of proficiency measures for heritage learners

BEYOND THIS WEEK

• Connecting linguistic research and pedagogical practice

• Building bridges across heritage languages

• Creating a viable network of HL researchers and educators :

Blogs? Tweets? Online classrooms? Online lab meetings?

Coming soon: a blog on HL at the Polinsky Lab website:http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~herpro/index.htm

THANK YOU! ENJOY YOUR WEEK AT UIUC!

Documents

Third Annual Heritage Language Research Institute Introductory remarks Maria Polinsky