Seventh Heritage Language Research Institute

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Examining heritage language through online methods from the language sciences

The field of research focused on heritage language has employed a variety of methods to understand multiple aspects of heritage language acquisition, knowledge and use. Typically, studies employ one or more offline, behavioral measures of heritage language performance. Although each of these offline methods provides particular insights into questions of heritage language, the use of online methods has the potential to significantly further the field’s understanding of different aspects of heritage language processing and performance—a point made by Bolger and Zapata (2011), who called for the coupling of online, psycholinguistic methods with other more commonly used methods in the field.  However, such a coupling is not evident in current heritage language research. Indeed, a bibliographic search with “heritage language” and each of the terms “self-paced reading,” “eye-tracking,” and “event-related potentials” resulted in no (zero) identified publications. (Note that a search with “second language” and each of the terms resulted in 64, 23 and 96 publications, respectively.) Given the call for the incorporation of online methods in the field, the current workshop aims to provide a practical introduction to three psycholinguistic methods commonly used in the language sciences to examine online linguistic processing: self-paced reading, eye-tracking and event-related potentials. First, the workshop will provide (a) description of each of these techniques, (b) consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of each technique generally and in regard to heritage language research more specifically, and (c) examples of ongoing research that employs such methods. Next, guidelines of experimental design that are both common to studies of online processing and particular to each of these methods will be reviewed. Finally, participants will engage in developing potential experiments of heritage language processing.  The end goal of the workshop will be for participants to be knowledgeable of methods, issues of experimental design, and resources that can be used to facilitate the incorporation of online, psycholinguistic research into the larger body of research on heritage language acquisition, knowledge and use.