Heritage Language Acquisition Research Articles

Input effects and unidirectional transfer in Mandarin–English heritage bilingual children: The case of spatial prepositional zai-phrases

Aims and objectives: This study investigates the effects of fine-grained aspects of input and cross-linguistic influence on the placement of prepositional zai-phrase ( zai-PP) in heritage Mandarin. Methodology: Utterances with zai-PPs were extracted from transcripts of an elicited narration task administered with child heritage speakers of Mandarin ( n = 27, aged 4–14) and their parents ( n = 18) in the United Kingdom, and compared with those produced by child and adult Mandarin speakers in Beijing in a similar narration task, selected from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Data and analysis: The zai-PPs were coded for pre/postverbal placement and event semantics of co-occurring verbs, as well as innovative uses. Comparisons were made between groups of participants, and correlations were performed among child and input variables. Findings: In Mandarin, the heritage children overused postverbal zai-PPs across measures and comparisons, producing innovative uses of postverbal zai-PPs not found in the input or Beijing baselines. Their production of preverbal zai-PPs increases with age (proxy for cumulative amount of input) rather than structural frequency in their parental input. In English, they correctly placed spatial PPs postverbally. Our findings revealed protracted development of zai-PP placement in heritage Mandarin due to inherent complexity of the structure, reduction of input in the heritage language at school age, and strong unidirectional transfer from English to Mandarin. Originality: This study is among the first to understand a heritage structure by analysing speech samples of both heritage children and their parents and examine input–outcome relations between them directly. Significance: The placement of zai-PP in relation to individual verbs with different event semantics is subject to protracted development and vulnerable to majority language influence in heritage language acquisition, but further development at the school age is likely, if sufficient amounts of input are provided.

Third-Generation Heritage Spanish Acquisition and Socialization: Word Learning and Overheard Input in an L.A.-Based Mexican Family

This case study examines overheard speech in a third-generation heritage Spanish Mexican family. It presents Spanish use longitudinally and describes overheard Spanish word use in interaction. Transcribed on CLAN to create a plurilingual corpus, ethnographic video data consisted of 24 h across three sampling periods, yielding nearly 30,000 Spanish, English, and language mixed utterances. Quantitative analyses indicate strong Spanish use in the first sample, before dropping. Qualitative descriptions show the third-generation target-child’s attunement to overheard Spanish, and her agency to use Spanish. Overheard input helps her use Spanish words, influencing her social encounters. This paper examines what we coded as overheard input in heritage language acquisition and socialization research. The language practices of one multigenerational Mexican family in California are explored, accounting for how their language practices in multiparty interaction co-create meaning, and how they help a third-generation child use Spanish words grounded in daily experiences. The findings contribute to the discussion of bilingualism in general and definitions of heritage bilingualism in particular. The results underscore the understudied role of overhead speech produced by a diversity of multigenerational family members and word learning. Participation frameworks are dynamically constructed by all participants as permeable, inclusive, and engage the children’s use of inherited bilingual and bicultural practices, suggesting that heritage bilingualism is not just about abstract grammar.

Protracted development in the heritage lexicon

Abstract Research on heritage language acquisition at the school age has shown protracted development and early stabilisation in morphosyntax and the lexicon. Our study examined the properties of resultative verb compound (RVC), a structure at the crossroads of the lexicon and morphosyntax, in second-generation child heritage speakers in the UK who had continuous input in Mandarin Chinese since birth. We analysed three subclasses of RVCs produced by the heritage children (n = 27, age 4–14) and their parents (n = 18) in an oral narration task and compared them with those by children in Beijing (n = 48, age 4–9) from existing databases. Our results show that the heritage children produced RVCs quite frequently and felicitously yet highly repetitively and conservatively, with a remarkably large proportion of their RVCs consisting of a strongly lexicalised subclass with direct lexical equivalents in English. Correlational analyses show that the heritage children’s RVCs improve with age, rather than provision of RVC in the parental input, indicating the role of cumulative input in RVC acquisition. Overall, the development of RVC in heritage Mandarin is delayed rather than stabilised or attrited, supporting the lexical account for grammatical vulnerabilities in proficient heritage speakers.

On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

Studies on school-aged children have been infrequent in research on Spanish as a heritage language. The present study explored how dual-language immersion education, patterns of heritage language use, proficiency, and age shape child Spanish heritage speakers’ production and selection of differential object marking (DOM). A total of 57 English–Spanish bilingual children and 18 Spanish-dominant adults completed sentence completion and morphology selection tasks. Results revealed that the group of heritage speaker children that produced and selected the differential object marker most frequently was the seventh and eighth grade children (ages 12–14, the oldest in the study) who had completed a dual-language immersion program. Different factors accounted for variability in each task: bilingual education and proficiency affected the production of DOM, while age affected selection. Heritage speakers selected DOM more frequently than they produced this structure. These findings have implications for theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasizes that language experience and exposure account for differences between heritage speakers and argue for the dissociation of production from underlying syntactic knowledge. The data also argue that heritage speakers may possess a bilingual alignment for DOM, whereby underlying receptive knowledge is modulated by cumulative exposure, while production depends more on bilingual education and proficiency in Spanish.

The Distribution of Manner and Frequency Adverbs in Child Heritage Speakers of Spanish

We investigate the acquisition of adverb placement in Spanish among school-age child heritage speakers of Spanish born and raised in the US by Mexican parents. We examine frequency and manner adverbs with negative and positive polarity and the potential role of cross-linguistic influence, dominance, and experience in the path and rate of development. Fourteen child heritage speakers of Spanish born and raised in the US and twenty-five Spanish monolingual children from Mexico completed an elicited production task. Results showed that the heritage children produced significantly fewer verb-raising structures compared to the monolingual children, leading to a higher proportion of pre-verbal adverb use and adverb-final use. The heritage children treated manner and frequency adverbs with negative and positive polarity significantly differently. We also found a strong correlation between dominance and experience in the probability of producing specific adverbial positions. In other words, common adverbial positions in English were more likely to be produced with higher dominance and experience in English; likewise, Spanish adverbial positions were more likely to be used with higher dominance and experience in Spanish. We argue for differential outcomes in child heritage grammar due to differences in the path and rate of language development as well as the role of dominance and experience in child heritage language acquisition.

Concept-based instruction grounded on Vygotsky’s Theory of Mind: Developing heritage Spanish students’ metalinguistic knowledge on the subjunctive mood

This paper examines the benefits of using Concept-Based Instruction, (CBI), grounded on Vygotsky’s Theory of Mind (Vygotsky, 1986), to develop heritage Spanish students’ metalinguistic knowledge on the Spanish subjunctive mood. Metalinguistic knowledge refers to the explicit and conscious knowledge students have about the linguist structures and overall characteristics of a language. It “is knowledge that students can explain and verbalize. Vygotsky’s Theory of Mind is based on the notion that development of language takes place when it is internalized and verbalized.Heritage Spanish (HS) students acquire the heritage language (HL) in informal, natural settings through interaction with family, friends, and community members. However, the heritage language input starts to diminish once students are enrolled in formal education, and English becomes the language of instruction (Montrul, 2020). It is then, that at an early age, HS students begin formal schooling in English, and many of the Spanish linguistic features, which had started to be acquired are halted. The lack of opportunities to have formal instruction in the heritage language has been one of the causes of incomplete heritage language acquisition, language attrition, or language loss (Rothman 2007; Pires & Rothman, 2009; Delgado, 2009). The Spanish subjunctive is one of the first linguistic features that suffers erosion since it is not fully developed when HSs enter formal education, and the main language of instruction is English (Potowski, Regerski, & Morgan-Short, 2009).Unfortunately, when HS students attempt to re-learn their heritage language in higher education, the instructional approaches are meant to meet the needs of the non-native Spanish students (Eckerson, 2015), which are mixed with HS students in most higher education institutions in the United States. Vygotsky’s Theory of Mind (Vygotsky, 1986) has motivated concept-based instruction to learn conceptual categories of a language such as mood, aspect, and tense. The main tenet of CBI is to develop performance not just competence on language concepts.

Frequency matters in second language acquisition too! Frequency effects in the production of preterit morphology with state verbs in Spanish second language learners and heritage speakers

The feature reassembly approach to second language acquisition research has been influential in laying the groundwork for recent theories of heritage languages. Lexical frequency has emerged as an important variable in recent studies within a feature-oriented approach to heritage language acquisition, but the focus on frequency has not yet received considerable attention with second language learners. To determine whether lexical frequency affects both populations of bilinguals, 51 adult heritage speakers and 40 second language learners of Spanish carried out a production task concerning preterit aspect morphology with state verbs of varying frequency, which represents an area of the Spanish aspectual system that is challenging for bilingual populations to acquire. Heritage speakers and second language learners were highly similar in their production tendencies: lower-proficiency speakers used the preterit with the least-frequent state verbs, while more proficient speakers in both groups showed less sensitivity to frequency, despite overall chance levels of preterit production. These findings extend recent research on Spanish as a heritage language by showing that second language learners are also influenced by frequency in their production of aspect morphology.

Aspectual se and Telicity in Heritage Spanish Bilinguals: The Effects of Lexical Access, Dominance, Age of Acquisition, and Patterns of Language Use

While differences in the production and acceptability of aspectual inflectional morphology between Spanish–English heritage and monolingually raised speakers of Spanish have been argued to support incomplete acquisition approaches to heritage language acquisition, other approaches have argued that differences in access (e.g., lexical access) to representations for receptive and productive purposes are at the core of some of the unique characteristics of heritage language data. We investigate these issues by focusing on the effects of lexical access, dominance, age of acquisition and patterns of language use in heritage Spanish–English bilinguals. We study aspectual se in Spanish, which yields telic interpretations, in expressions such as María se comió la manzana ‘María ate the apple (completely)’ and Maria ate the apple (where completion may not be reached). Our results indicate that se generates telic interpretations for the heritage and monolingually raised group with no group effect. Heritage speakers showed no English effects in terms of lexical access, age of acquisition, patterns of language use or dominance. This suggests that the heritage group did not differ from their monolingually raised counterparts and showed no evidence of incomplete acquisition of telicity.

Differential Object Marking and Diachronic Incrementation in Child Heritage Romanian

In contemporary Romanian, differential object marking is undergoing a change from a system allowing two marking patterns in optional contexts to a system which preserves only one of these patterns. In the present study we verify if child heritage speakers opt for the novel system at a level beyond the one in the input. The data come from 34 narratives by 7- and 10-year-old heritage speakers of Romanian living in France, compared to 34 narratives by monolingual children living in the homeland, 11 adult first generation immigrants from France and 10 Romanian adults from Romania. The findings suggest that language change is not advanced in a heritage language acquisition scenario when the change is found in the weaker language and targets a phenomenon at the syntax-discourse interface.

The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language Acquisition

Abstract Previous studies disagree as to whether heritage bilinguals demonstrate loss of knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender. As phonetic variability is known to affect the acquisition of certain grammatical markers, we examine whether bilinguals’ gender difficulties relate to bilingual contact-induced phonetic variability, namely, reduction in the inventory of word-final unstressed vowels. We analyzed narratives from children in the United States (n = 49, ages 4–12). All NP s (n = 1415) were analyzed for structure, noun class, and morphology. Word-final vowels were sub-selected for acoustic analyses. Morpho-syntactically, group results show high accuracy with gender (95%), but with wide individual variation (44%–100%). Speakers also show individual variability and substantive numbers of vowel misclassifications (6%–33%) with higher variability for /a/ and /o/. We found bilingual effects in both domains but no association between phonetics and gender accuracy. These findings have implications for the relationship between phonetics and grammar, and for the morphosyntax of Spanish gender.

Syntactic optionality in heritage Spanish: How patterns of exposure and use affect clitic climbing

Aims and Objectives: This study explores Spanish heritage speakers’ (HSs) knowledge of clitic climbing and the (extra-)linguistic factors that modulate it. Design: Heritage speakers of Spanish completed three screening tasks (a background language questionnaire, a productive vocabulary task, and proficiency task) and two experimental tasks (an elicited production task, and a forced choice task) examining their knowledge of clitic climbing in different contexts. Data and Analysis: Thirty-nine participants completed two experimental tasks. Each task included 32 critical items distributed in four conditions. The data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models. Findings: Patterns of language exposure and use are a strong predictor for clitic climbing knowledge while the effects of age of onset of bilingualism found contradict our hypothesis. Originality: This study examines production and interpretation data of clitic climbing knowledge in combination with extralinguistic factors that may facilitate heritage language acquisition and maintenance. Sequential bilinguals show a stronger enclisis bias than simultaneous bilinguals. Significance: The results show that, in cases of optionality, self-reported heritage language exposure and use may be a stronger predictor than age of onset of bilingualism of the dominant language. Limitations: This study does not have acceptability data on either grammatical or ungrammatical instances of proclisis or enclisis. In addition, because the test items feature different verbs, no lexical analysis can be conducted. Finally, using an adapted version of the BLP instead of its original normed version restricts opportunities for comparability and reproducibility.

Resilience and vulnerability of discourse-conditioned word order in heritage Spanish

AbstractHeritage speakers—bilinguals who acquire minority languages naturalistically in infancy but are typically majority-language-dominant in adulthood—generally acquire grammars that differ systematically from thebaselineinput received in childhood. Yet not all areas diverge equally; understanding what characterizes divergence or resilience of a given feature is crucial to understanding heritage language acquisition. In this realm, we investigate the discourse-conditioned non-canonical word orders that markinformation focusin Spanish. Focus bears the hallmarks of structures that diverge from the baseline, yet the evidence is mixed. We use an offline forced-choice task and an online self-paced reading task to compare heritage speakers’ judgments and processing to the baseline’s, and we find, echoing recent work, that the heritage speakers largely resemble baseline speakers. We interpret this convergence with reference to seven factors potentially affecting heritage language acquisition and identify one hypothesis—that focus facilitates processing due to its structural and pragmatic salience—as a promising explanation.

On the Explanatory Validity of Proxies of Frequency in Heritage Language Acquisition Research

Abstract Use and activation of the heritage language (HL) are essential for its maintenance, and the frequency of individual words affects heritage speakers’ (HS) morphological knowledge. However, some studies have used participants’ ratings of frequency of words and proficiency as proxies for frequency of use and activation. Regarding lexical frequency, some studies have relied on language corpora, while others have used participants’ self-ratings. This study explores the relationships between these variables, comparing 53 Spanish HS’ frequency of HL use with their self-ratings of thirty verbs, proficiency, and age of onset of bilingualism. Self-ratings correlated weakly with frequency of use while proficiency and age of onset did not, but the rankings of verbs according to participants’ self-ratings correlated with those from three corpora. Therefore, proficiency and age of onset may not be ideal proxies for activation, but the two techniques used to measure lexical frequency show a robust relationship with each other.

Frequency effects and aspect morphology with state verbs in heritage Spanish

Abstract A total of 54 HS and 17 Spanish-dominant participants completed an elicited production task (EPT) and a forced choice task (FCT) to explore how proficiency, frequency of use, age of acquisition of English, morphological regularity, and lexical frequency affected their production and selection of preterit morphology with states. Results showed that HS’ production of preterit with states was negatively correlated with lexical frequency, such that these bilinguals were more likely to use the preterit with less-frequent verbs. Higher-proficiency speakers were less susceptible to the effects of lexical frequency in production. In contrast, proficiency modulated HS’ responses in the FCT. HS were more likely to select the preterit in the FCT than to produce it in the EPT. Together, these results support theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasize the role of activation of linguistic features and asymmetries between production and comprehension.

Heritage Language Long-Distance Acquisition in Remote Areas—Implementing Telecollaboration in Social Media to Increase Exposure to Polish Language and Culture

This paper reports on a study conducted during the implementation of the Polish language and culture promotion project, run by Maria Curie-Skłodowska University and financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. In this project, Polish students were involved in telecollaboration with Brazilians from the Ijui region. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibilities of arranging heritage language acquisition through telecollaboration via social media. Due to the isolation of many communities, telecollaboration can be a useful method facilitating heritage language and culture acquisition across the world. This article used the case study method, in which the “Language Clinic” component of the project was taken under detailed scrutiny.
 The project showed language shift and translanguaging as it happened—initially, the students from Brazil used English as a lingua franca and as a classroom language; however, once they grew more confident, they replaced English with Polish as the target language. For Polish student assistants, participation in the project brought about many benefits: increased orthophonic awareness, gaining an understanding of how careless articulation and inappropriate intonation of the utterance may lead to communication breakdown.

Null objects in Polish heritage language acquisition in contact with German

Aims and objectives: This study investigates the acquisition of referential expressions for direct objects by child heritage speakers of Polish living in Germany. Our main research questions are how object expression develops in bilingual children and whether their path or pace of acquisition differs from monolingual children. Methodology: We investigate the use of referential expressions in an elicited production task. In all, 39 Polish-German bilingual children participated in the test. Data and analysis: We compare the data of four age groups of bilingual children – 3- to 4-year-olds, 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 9- to 10-year-olds – to each other and to monolingual children at the respective ages. For the analysis of participants’ responses, we ran a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a multinominal dependent variable. Findings: The results show that child heritage language (HL) speakers of Polish display knowledge of semantic and pragmatic constraints of object realization from early stages on. However, from age 5 and up to age 9 to 10, they still produce high rates of inappropriate null objects and show a deceleration in the development of this knowledge, compared to monolingual children. This protracted development is attributed to reduced input in the HL, mainly due to the enrolment in the majority language school. Originality: This study is the first to investigate the development of referential expressions for direct objects in child heritage speakers of Polish in the age span 3 to 10 years. Significance: The study relates the higher rates of null objects in the bilingual production to the varying degrees of exposure to the HL during language development. Deceleration in the pace of object acquisition by the HL speakers at the age of 5 to 6 years is attributed to a prolonged stage of acquisition of integrating rules of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge.

Heritage Languages: Language Acquired, Language Lost, Language Regained

A heritage language is a sociopolitically minority and/or minoritized language acquired as the first or one of the first languages in a bilingual or multilingual context. Heritage languages are typically acquired under conditions of reduced exposure and are often used less than the majority language during late childhood and adolescence. Heritage languages show structural differences and changes at all levels of linguistic analysis from baseline grammars that arise from the complex interaction between the nature and quantity of input and the age of bilinguals. Although many situations give rise to heritage languages, this article focuses on immigrants and their children and reviews foundational studies of the linguistic properties of heritage languages; studies of age effects that have shed light on critical differences between first, second, and heritage language acquisition; and recent studies of heritage language relearning and reactivation. The implications of the study of heritage languages for bilingualism and society and for the language and cognitive sciences are discussed.

Heritage Language Acquisition and Maintenance of Turkish in The United States: Challenges to Teaching Turkish as a Heritage Language

Compared to an extensive amount of research on Turkish heritage speakers in Europe, the heritage language acquisition and maintenance of Turkish in the United States has only recently received scholarly attention. This article discusses the heritage language status of Turkish in the United States from an educational perspective with an emphasis on current challenges to teaching Turkish within this context. The educational needs of Turkish-American learners are contextualized within a brief history of Turkish immigration in the United States. Opportunities for learning Turkish in an institutional setting include attending community-based Turkish heritage language schools in early years or Turkish language programs in American universities in later years. Some of the challenges observed in both educational settings include, but are not limited to, a lack of qualified teachers and relevant educational resources as well as generational conflicts in attitudes towards learning Turkish as a heritage language. The article concludes with a discussion on how these challenges may influence the maintenance of Turkish language and culture in the future in a society where English-only language policies are mandated.

The Role of Internal and External Factors for Code-Switching: A Study of Early Multilingualism in Germany with Special Reference to Catalan as a Heritage Language

In heritage language acquisition studies, it has been observed that heritage speakers may experience a shift of language dominance from the heritage language to the majority language due to input quantity and quality factors. The appearance of code-switching in the productions of multilingual speakers has been well attested and has been mostly linked to age and language dominance as well as family language policies and consistence of input, among other factors. For the appearance of code-switching, our cross-sectional study analyses language dominance (MLU) and fluency (w/minute) along with child-external factors, such as family language policies, family language and siblings’ interaction, in sixteen multilingual children (mean age 5;7) being raised in Germany with German and Catalan (and another L1) simultaneously. In a nutshell, children who are dominant in the majority language ultimately code-switch more frequently than the other groups. Interestingly, balanced and heritage-language-dominant children present instances of intrasentential code-switching (particularly insertions and alternations), while intersentential code-switching is frequent across all groups. When families have chosen the ‘one person-one language’ strategy and do not have a family language, code-switching is almost absent. Finally, sibling groups using both the heritage and the majority languages in their interactions show low code-switching rates.

Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad ed. by Rebecca Pozzi, Tracy Quan and Chelsea Escalante

Reviewed by: Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad ed. by Rebecca Pozzi, Tracy Quan and Chelsea Escalante Guilherme Von Streber Pozzi, Rebecca, Tracy Quan, and Chelsea Escalante, editors. Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad. Routledge, 2021. Pp. 306. ISBN 9780367256890. Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad addresses an important and often-overlooked topic in language education and linguistics research: Study Abroad (SA) programs and Heritage Speakers (HS) of Spanish. The volume’s editors, Rebecca Pozzi, Tracy Quan, and Chelsea Escalante, share a background in Applied Linguistics and their research, published in noted journals and volumes by Routledge and Multilingual Matters, explores second and heritage language development, acquisition, and language pedagogy. This new edited volume presents studies of the mixed experiences that Spanish HSs go through during these international programs. The focus of the volume lies primarily in language development in the context of SA, yet identity, too, emerges as an equally important aspect that influences these students’ learning and lived experiences. The volume begins with an introduction by the editors that briefly situates the Spanish HS population within the context of SA while also providing an overview of the text. Then, it features five main sections: (1) sociolinguistic acquisition; (2) pragmatics; (3) identity; (4) linguistic development; and (5) program design. The volume has a total of thirteen chapters. All sections introduce any given subtopic with a review of literature. Due to the scarcity of materials, these frequently borrow from domestic Spanish HS language learning experiences and/or L2 study abroad, while often proposing convergence points between them. The volume concludes with an afterword by Christina Sanz that provides future directions for Spanish HS & SA research followed by a detailed topic index. In the first section, “Sociolinguistic Acquisition,” Geeslin and colleagues begin with a review of literature on sociolinguistic competence concerning SA while pointing out to future research paths on the subfield. Then, in “The Long-Term Impact of a Sojourn Abroad,” George and Salgado-Robles present a study on pronoun distinction that suggests that sustained contact with SA hosts increases participants long-term ability to accommodate pronoun choice according to their interlocutors. Next, Peace’s study “Aquí el español es muy diferente ” explores linguistic accommodation and points out that participants—who were of Mexican descent—increased lexical and phonological accommodation when interacting with Spaniard peers. Lastly, Escalante demonstrates in “Individual Differences in Dialectal Accommodation” that degree of linguistic convergence for accommodation highly varies from person to person, based on factors such as background and intrinsic motivations. The second section, “Pragmatics,” starts with Shively’s review of literature on pragmatics visà-vis SA. Based on L2 pragmatics literature, the author suggests that HSs who studied abroad show more pragmatic competence than their US-based HS peers. Moreover, in “The Pragmatic Development of Heritage Speakers of Spanish Studying Abradi in Argentina, ” the volume’s editors explore address pronoun choice variation in Mexican American HSs and their convergence towards use of the second person singular pronoun vos, used in Argentina. Their initial results indicate that HSs in SA do increase pragmatic competence after completing their programs abroad. In the third section, “Identity,” Leeman and Driver’s piece draws attention to a frequently overlooked aspect in SA design: the importance of developing critical awareness towards ideologies before and during SA experience. Next, Menard-Warwick, Kehoe, and Palmer’s piece “The Diverse Experiences of Heritage Speakers at a Guatemalan Language School” comprises a qualitative, interview-based study conducted during SA that focuses on identity construction of three participants. Particular attention is given to the tensions in how linguistic agency develops in the “contact zone” (160). The fourth section, “Linguistic Development,” begins with Escalante, Viera, and Patiño-Vega’s chapter reviewing the literature on development of oral and written abilities of L2 heritage language students abroad. The authors point to new research paths in corpus research, global [End Page 476] proficiency assessment, and methodologies for linguistic development among HSs in SA. Next, Marqués-Pascual reports on her longitudinal study “The Impact of SA on Spanish Heritage Learners’ Writing Development” that focused on 22 HLs during a semester or year abroad in Spain. The author concludes that participants significantly improved writing...