This chapter argues that some of the linguistic particularities of heritage grammars can be ascribed to the amplification of variation that is present in the input to heritage speakers. Our argumentation is based on studies on European Portuguese as a heritage language acquired in contact with German (and other environmental languages). Three different dimensions of linguistic variation are taken into considera...
Certain linguistic structures are more challenging than others for bilingual speakers. This is true across different languages and language combinations. In this paper, we propose an account in terms of different types of linguistic complexity. Our argumentation derives from the results of a study based on a cloze test including 40 different linguistic structures of European Portuguese (EP). 180 children partic...
Published online: 03 Jun 2024; The Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) is an assessment tool for children’s language abilities, which has been used in various languages and speaker types. The present study adapted the LITMUS-SRT to European Portuguese (EP) and applied it to 43 monolingual and 25 bilingual heritage speakers of EP with German as societal language (aged 6 to 10 years), in order to evaluate their knowle...
The nature and processing of semantic illusions (SI; when speakers fail to notice an anomalous word in a sentence that is contextually perfectly aligned with world knowledge) have been largely studied during first language comprehension. Although this issue is not free of controversy, findings sustain The Node Structure Theory, according to which SI is a phonological and/or semantic priming effect which occurs ...
This paper examines the use of referential expressions in the subject position in European Portuguese (EP) in a corpus of narratives written by two groups of Portuguese-speaking school-age children: monolingually-raised children living in Portugal and bilingual French-Portuguese children living in Switzerland. We focus on the children’s choice of null and overt subjects, considering both the syntactic context (...
Published online April 2, 2024; This paper presents an experimental approach to subject inversion in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We investigated the acceptability of SV and VS sentences by two groups of speakers: monolingually-raised and bilingual heritage speakers of BP, using acceptability judgment tasks to test the effect of verb type, definiteness and pragmatic context. Results confirm that BP lost VS order ...
The nature and processing of semantic illusions (SI; when speakers fail to notice an anomalous word in a sentence that is contextually perfectly aligned with world knowledge) have been largely studied during first language comprehension. Although this issue is not free of controversy, findings sustain The Node Structure Theory, according to which SI is a phonological and/or semantic priming effect which occurs ...
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Foreword to issue 11.; Nota Prévia ao n.º 11 da RAPL.
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