Investigating the linguistic and social effects of the first year of schooling on the grammar of child heritage speakers: focus on Polish heritage children in the UK

Abstract

This thesis investigates how changes in input and exposure to the majority language affect heritage language acquisition in the first year of school (known as Reception in the UK school system). Starting school is a crucial event in the life of a child heritage speaker: it signals the exposure to the majority language and a significant change in their linguistic input; it also signals a change in their social environment. This group of speakers experiences a major shift in their linguistic input and social context around the age of 4: they start school in the majority language. In this study, I focus on the acquisition of case by a group of 30 Polish child heritage speakers in England in order to try to tease apart three possible accounts: incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2008; Polinsky, 2006; Silva-Corvalán, 2003), attrition (Polinsky, 2011) and parental input effects (Pascual y Cabo, 2018; Montrul & Sanchez-Walker, 2013; Pires & Rothman, 2009). The specific research questions addressed in this thesis examine the extent of evidence of incomplete acquisition of case among these child heritage speakers and whether attrition occurs in the first year of Reception. The thesis also examines whether any increase or decrease in accuracy over the first year of Reception can be explained by language input and social networks.

In order to address these questions a narrative retelling task and an acceptability judgement task were used to assess the productive command and grammatical knowledge of three cases (nominative, genitive and locative). Sociograms were used to investigate the heritage children’s social networks. 130 participants took part in this study: 30 Polish heritage children and 30 Polish heritage parents in the UK and control groups which included: 30 Polish monolingual children in Poland, 20 monolingual Polish adults in Poland and 20 English monolingual children in the UK. The heritage speakers were tested twice, at the start and at the end of their first year in primary school. Some participants were also tested at the end of their second year at school. The BiLEC questionnaire (Unsworth, 2013) was used to assess the importance of any variables relating to language experience. Accuracy rates were analysed using mixed effects logistic regression models in R.

The results show that at group level, Polish heritage children do not differ from Polish monolingual children. Descriptively, however, it is clear that individually some of the Polish heritage children diverge from the baseline compared with the monolingual children in Poland. Furthermore, a heritage-only analysis in both tasks shows that for one of the cases, i.e. locative, Time (from start to end of Reception) has an effect. The decrease in accuracy is statistically significant for heritage speakers as a group and input quality (richness of exposure – RoE) is the predominant explanatory factor for this result by Polish heritage children. In the light of the original hypotheses, among some of the heritage children problems with case are visible from the start of the year, pointing to ongoing acquisition but only in a subgroup of children due to language-internal factors such as structural complexity associated with timing of acquisition, and in some children only at the end of the year, indicating onset of attrition in providing the exponent of one functional category. The individual analysis also reveals the influence of RoE and social networks on heritage language maintenance. Findings from this study confirm that some key changes do occur after the first year at school, but this change is only attested in some grammatical cases and for some children and it is modulated by both linguistic and social factors.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Anna Hart: orcid.org/0009-0000-4254-5533

ORCID for Laura Dominguez: orcid.org/0000-0003-2701-2469

ORCID for Elyse A Jamieson: orcid.org/0000-0001-8679-3360

ORCID for James Turner: orcid.org/0000-0001-6724-3056

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