Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Processing in Heritage Language Speakers: Evidence from Vietnamese-English Bilinguals

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This dissertation examines heritage language processing. A Heritage Language (HL) is a first language (L1) that has become a non-dominant language for its speakers because of its minority status. The question asked in this project is whether a heritage language (HL) behaves like a first language (L1) because an HL is learned as a native language, or if a heritage language (HL) behaves like a second language (L2) because it is underdeveloped like an L2. In order to test this, this study investigates the grammatical and lexical processing in Vietnamese-English bilinguals. Vietnamese, a heritage and minority language in the United States, is the fourth most spoken language outside of English (U. S. Census Bureau, 2015). This shows how prevalent HL speakers are in this country, and yet, there is a limited amount of research conducted on HL processing. Many bilingual language processing models, such as the Bilingual Interactive Activation model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002; van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998) and the episodic L2 hypothesis (Jiang & Forster, 2001; Witzel & Forster, 2012), were proposed based on evidence from bilinguals with a dominant L1 and less-dominant L2. Little is known about the processing of a non-dominant L1. The first portion of this study examines grammatical processing in HL speakers. A preliminary study compared grammatical processing in HL Vietnamese speakers to L1 Vietnamese-dominant speakers. Findings from this study suggest that HL speakers and L1-dominant speakers decompose L1 Vietnamese compound words in a very similar manner. To further investigate whether an HL is processed like an L1 or an L2, a follow-up study testing morphological decomposition in L2 English is proposed. The second portion of this study examines lexical processing in these speakers. L1 dominant bilinguals have reliably shown that L1 words automatically activate their respective L2 translations. However, it is unclear what happens to bilinguals whose dominant language has switched from their L1 to their L2.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.