Introduction to the special issue – Heritage language studies and early child bilingualism research: Understanding the connection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This issue is the result of a colloquium with the same title organized at the ISB 10 conference at Rutgers, USA, in May 2015. All the presenters, the discussant and one additional colleague have contributed to this collection of articles, which brings together linguists from the domain of heritage studies with those working on early child bilingualism (ECB). A language qualifies as a heritage language (HL) if ‘it is a language spoken at home or otherwise readily available to young children, and crucially this language is not the dominant language of the larger (national) society’ (Rothman, 2009, p. 156). HLs are learned early in life, either simultaneously with the dominant language or prior to the acquisition of the dominant language of the country; heritage speakers (HSs) are thus early bilinguals. There is, however, a gap between linguists studying ECB and linguists studying HSs. Linguists working on ECB mainly look at the early development of both languages in children growing up bilingually from birth or shortly afterwards and tend to report on similar developmental patterns in monolingual and bilingual children, and on (temporary) delay, acceleration or cross-linguistic influence in this development, mostly in Western Europe and Canada (De Houwer, 1990; Meisel, 1990; Paradis & Genesee, 1996). Linguists studying HSs, on the other hand, mainly look at young adults’ competence in their HL and tend to focus on signs of incomplete acquisition, mostly in the USA (Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky 2013; Montrul, 2008; Polinsky, 2006). This special issue brings together linguists from both fields to find out how to make the connection: to what extent can we observe similarities in the reported results on child bilinguals and HSs and to what extent do we observe differences? What motivates these similarities and differences? The contributions in this special issue all shed light on the comparison and thereby create new questions. We will briefly discuss some general factors that may influence different outcomes of early bilingualism over the lifespan (see also Hulk & Marinis, 2011).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".