Attrition, attainment, or grammatical borrowing? Multilingual minds and the languages within them

Objective

When people move to a new country, they often have to learn a new language, and their children grow up with the new societal language. This phenomenon is assessed in the linguistic literature from various angles yet has not reached an answer on what exactly tends to occur in such heritage and immigrant languages. Previous research has been unable to disentangle the effects of attrition and input from the effects of a person’s additional languages on their heritage language (HL) or first language (L1) (grammatical borrowing or reverse Linguistic Influence [rLI]). Much of this research indicates that languages tend to become more analytic, i.e., use separate words as opposed to grammatical morphological encoding. This is a result of a Western-European dominant presence in the literature: there is little available on HL and L1 in contact with societal languages that have richer morphological systems. We thus cannot pinpoint whether the cause of participants’ increasingly analytic speech is due to attrition, attainment, or rLI. ATOMIC will disentangle the effects of language attrition, language attainment, and rLI in heritage and L1 speakers. I will use a cutting-edge combination of online and offline tasks to investigate whether the use of grammatical features (case and gender) by heritage and L1 Croatian speakers can be explained by rLI. I will assess the speech and neural processing of Croatian (a language with gender and case) speakers living in Finland (case, no gender) and Sweden (gender, no case). This double-country plan allows for an exploration into how HL/L1 and societal languages interact to produce outcomes in heritage and L1 speakers, with key grammatical differences in each societal language. ATOMIC will create a model which broadens and fine-tunes our understanding of how immigrant speakers’ grammars change and develop, and advise on the development of resources for HL maintenance.