Doctoral Dissertation Research: The acquisition of Mandarin by heritage speakers and second language learners

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In the US, Chinese is the third most-spoken language, after English and Spanish. As China gains visibility on the world stage, the number of adult (post-puberty) second language learners of Mandarin is growing, as is the number of Mandarin heritage speakers, individuals who were exposed to Mandarin from their parents since birth, but as adults are dominant in English. This project will examine how second language learners and heritage speakers of Mandarin acquire four different linguistic properties of Mandarin. The project will have potential implications for language pedagogy, by identifying problem areas facing learners of Mandarin and providing information about challenges that face heritage speakers vs. traditional classroom learners. Given that Mandarin is a relatively understudied language, this project will increase our understanding of this language. Previous studies on heritage Spanish have found heritage speakers to have a selective advantage over second language learners on phonology but not on morphosyntax. The goal of this study is to examine whether such selective advantages hold for Mandarin, one of the hardest languages for English speakers to acquire. This study investigates whether, when both Mandarin proficiency and the dominant language (English) are held constant, early age of acquisition confers an advantage to heritage speakers over second language learners, and whether this depends on the linguistic domain (phonology, morpho-semantics, syntax, and syntax-semantics interface). Three groups (native speakers, heritage speakers and second language learners) will complete three psycholinguistic tasks testing four Mandarin linguistic phenomena: tone sandhi, aspect marking, relative clauses, and long-distance reflexives. These are chosen because (i) they represent different subdomains in linguistics, (ii) they differ regarding the age of acquisition in monolingual children, and (iii) English and Mandarin differ on these phenomena, which is important for both pedagogical and linguistic reasons. The results will contribute to the fields of Chinese linguistics and language acquisition.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.