Bernhard Brehmer & Agnieszka Czachór

Collaborative Research Center on Multilingualism (SFB 538)
University of Hamburg (Germany)

The paper presents first results of a 3-year research project on heritage speakers of Polish living in Germany. The main goal of the project was to investigate the degree of language loss among second-generation speakers of Polish in Germany who have never been exposed to formal schooling in their L1. We focused on the preservation and/or loss of the following grammatical features: genitive of negation, verb government, verbal aspect, gender agreement, and word order. Our main purpose was to determine which of these (morpho)syntactic features are especially vulnerable to language loss and which turn out to be more or less stable. Another issue was to identify the role of contact-induced changes in the heritage grammar, i.e. transfer effects from German as the dominant language of our subjects.

Data collection included short elicited narratives, the retelling of a picture story, a c-test, and a grammaticality judgment task. Furthermore, we conducted an interview with our subjects to gather data about their socio-linguistic profiles. Three groups of subjects were tested: 30 adult heritage speakers of Polish who were born in Germany or moved to Germany before the age of 6 and who have never received any schooling in Polish; a control group of 30 adult speakers of Polish who moved to Germany after finishing at least eight years of schooling in Poland and who now have been living for more than two years in Germany; and another control group of 30 «monolingual» speakers of Polish (matched by age and educational background), who were recorded in Warsaw.

Our heritage speakers indeed exhibit deficits in all of the investigated domains. However, the degree of vulnerability of the structures is different: The most problematic area for our adult heritage speakers are verb government patterns, where a lot of transfer effects from German can be observed. Other problematic features include word order, the genitive of negation, and aspect, whereas gender agreement is only marginally affected. What still remains unclear, however, is the question whether these deviations from the baseline are due to incomplete acquisition of the structures in childhood, or to attrition of structures which were acquired in childhood but got lost due to a reduction of input and output in their L1 at later stages of their language development. The current paper will address this question by comparing the divergent structures of our heritage speakers with the deficits exhibited by our first control group (i.e. the late bilingual group). The idea is that deficits that occur in both investigated groups are very likely to be assigned to attrition processes, whereas deficits that are exhibited only by our heritage speakers group could be a product of attrition as well as of incomplete acquisition. The results show that errors in verb government patterns and in the use of the genitive of negation occur in both groups more often than in the monolingual control group, whereas late bilinguals and monolinguals are not discriminable with regard to the results of their performance in word order, aspect, and gender agreement. Here, only the heritage speaker group shows significant deviations from the baseline grammar.

Published: Tuesday, October 1, 2013