Cross-Linguistic Influence of Competing Knowledge: Comparative Morphosyntactic Variations in Heritage Language Development (CLICK) - MSCA (2020-2022)

The project is funded by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA). Due to increasing global mobility, research into how immigrants acquire and use multiple languages has become a major topic in the past few decades. However, comparatively little is known about how the developmental trajectories of native minority languages (i.e. heritage languages (HLs)) are shaped alongside the societal languages in their children who are heritage speakers (HSs). The CLICK project, as the first study to investigate how different societal languages leave their traces on the developmental trajectories of the same HL, will make a significant contribution to an emergent subfield of bilingualism, namely Heritage Language Bilingualism (HLB). This will be done by studying HSs of Persian/Farsi in contact with two societally dominant languages in France and Spain. We will innovatively combine offline and online methodologies to explore whether or not the syntactic status of pronominal subjects (null and overt subjects in the case of Spanish versus overt subjects only as in French) affects the development and maintenance of related properties in Persian as a HL. Additionally, we will strive to establish if a novel co-registered methodology which combines online and offline measures in the same task offers a promising test battery to better capture underlying grammars of HSs in different language contact situations.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA)