This paper examines the effects of onset age of exposure to a dominant language (English) with respect to Korean heritage speakers’ knowledge of unaccusativity involving quantifier float. In an attempt to see how the acquisition of heritage grammar is affected by this factor, the present study compares two groups of heritage speakers: early (US-born, n = 13) and late (Korean-born, n = 14) bilinguals. The results show that compared to the late bilinguals, the early bilinguals did not give differential ratings to unergative and unaccusative verbs, which confirms the widely noted observation that the earlier onset age of exposure to English is, the more likely heritage speakers’ linguistic knowledge of the heritage language is incomplete. In addition, the results show that incomplete knowledge was also found with the late bilinguals (mean onset age 9), in that they did not accept unaccusative verbs as strongly as the native controls did.
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Giancaspro, David
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Jee, Min Jung
2018. Heritage language proficiency in relation to attitudes, motivation, and age at immigration: a case of Korean-Australians. Language, Culture and Curriculum 31:1 ► pp. 70 ff.
Fukuda, Shin
2017. Floating numeral quantifiers as an unaccusative diagnostic in native, heritage, and L2 Japanese speakers. Language Acquisition 24:3 ► pp. 169 ff.
Fukuda, Shin
2021. Acceptability and Truth-Value Judgment Studies in East Asian Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax, ► pp. 421 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Grammatical Aspects of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 579 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Research Approaches to Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 373 ff.
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