Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition
cambridge.org/bil
Commentary
Cite this article: Serratrice L (2020). What
counts as the baseline in child heritage
language acquisition? Bilingualism: Language
and Cognition 23, 46–47. https://doi.org/
10.1017/S1366728919000518
Received: 31 May 2019
Revised: 7 July 2019
Accepted: 8 July 2019
First published online: 7 November 2019
Address for correspondence:
Ludovica Serratrice, University of Reading
School of Psychology and Clinical Language
Sciences Harry Pitt Building Reading RG6 7BE
United Kingdom
E-mail: l.serratrice@reading.ac.uk
© Cambridge University Press 2019
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000518 Published online by Cambridge University Press
What counts as the baseline in child heritage
language acquisition?
Ludovica Serratrice
University of Reading
Polinsky and Scontras (Polinsky & Scontras, 2019) focus on the comprehension and produc-
tion of the heritage language in the adult population, in keeping with the majority of studies
that have focused on heritage speakers. Although the heritage speaker label originated in the
context of the study of the minority heritage language in adults in North America, it can
equally be applied to the study of children who speak a language that is different from the
dominant societal language (Kupisch & Rothman, 2018). In the following I will extend
Polinsky and Scontras’s main focus from adult speakers to child speakers, I will make some
considerations on input as a trigger of “divergence between heritage speakers and the relevant
baseline”, and I will briefly consider how children’s own production may affect heritage
language acquisition.
Polinsky and Scontras variously characterise the baseline language as the language “that
served as the input for acquisition” and “the monolingual standard of comparison”. On the
one hand Polinsky and Scontras acknowledge that heritage speakers “encounter input that
is different both qualitatively and quantitatively from the monolingual learner”, and at the
same time they talk about “divergent attainment, a situation where the learner acquires a sys-
tem different from the baseline”. The meaning of baseline language thus remains ambiguous
throughout as it wavers between being a “diasporic variety spoken by first-generation immi-
grants” and the monolingual benchmark. Polinsky and Scontras further argue that “heritage
speakers constitute an outcome often assumed to be impossible outside of pathology or
trauma: children exposed to a language from birth who nevertheless appear to deviate from
the expected native-like mastery in pronounced and principled ways”.
This characterisation of heritage language acquisition is rather puzzling since, by definition,
heritage speakers are not exposed to the minority language in the same context as monolingual
learners, and therefore it is not clear why they should be expected to acquire a variety that is
not in their input. Children acquire the language to which they are exposed, and in this sense
their acquisition can never be divergent, unless it is so because of a developmental language
disorder. In the same way in which one would not consider the British variety of English of
a child brought up in England to be divergent from American English, it is not clear why a
child who is exposed to British English as a heritage language in Italy should be considered
to be in any way divergent from a monolingual child in England. Child heritage speakers
are exposed to a variety of the minority language from their parents and potentially from a
community of other heritage language speakers who, in the best of cases, may be first-
generation immigrants at different stages along the language attrition continuum, and as
such more or less distant from the monolingual variety in their country of origin (Schmid
& Köpke, 2017). In other scenarios the child’s input in the heritage language could come
from second- or even third-generation heritage language speakers themselves and therefore
they would be exposed to a variety that is potentially even further from the monolingual native
language spoken in the original homeland. Unfortunately, there is still very little research com-
paring child heritage speakers’ language production with their caregivers’ input to test the
extent to which the way in which they “diverge” from a hypothetical monolingual baseline
is actually the result of their expected convergence on the input they do receive. Paradis
and Navarro (2003) provided just such a tentative piece of evidence in accounting for the pro-
portion of redundant overt pronouns in the Spanish of a young Spanish–English bilingual
child, but more research is needed to show how child heritage language learners actually con-
verge on the heritage language baseline.
Another under-studied variable that may contribute to explaining differential outcomes in
the acquisition of a heritage language is children’s own production. Over the course of devel-
opment, child heritage speakers will vary in the extent to which they switch to using the dom-
inant language when addressed in the heritage language. Birth order and the start of formal
education are two factors that influence how much child heritage speakers will engage with
the dominant societal language (Bridges & Hoff, 2014). Recent research on child heritage
speakers that has factored in measures of language output alongside language input has
shown a contribution of language use to expressive skills over and above input (Bohman,
Bedore, Peña, Mendez-Perez & Gillam, 2010; Ribot, Hoff & Burridge, 2018). Unlike monolin-
gual children, who have no choice but to use their one language, child heritage speakers do
 Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
have a choice. The way in which they exercise that choice has
interesting implications, both for heritage language maintenance,
and for better understanding how children’s agency in their lan-
guage use affects their linguistic development.
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