BOOK OF ABSTRACTS - EUROSLA

linguistic proficiency attained by adult heritage speakers raise several
fundamental questions about the stability of early childhood bilingual
acquisition and the role of input and use in the development and
maintenance of a native language. They also raise key questions about the
role of age and experience in the ultimate attainment of early and late adult
bilinguals.
Because many college-age heritage speakers turn to the foreign or second
language classroom to learn, relearn, or expand their knowledge of the home
language, critical questions also arise as to how heritage speakers are similar
to, or different from, postpuberty second language learners.
In this talk, I will present recent experimental research addressing the
following questions: 1) Which areas of linguistic knowledge are robust and
which are fragile under incomplete acquisition in both second language
learners and heritage speakers? 2) Does age of acquisition bring an
advantage to heritage speakers in terms of native-like linguistic knowledge
as compared to late second language learners? 3) Do differences in the
language learning experiences of heritage speakers and second language
learners play a role in the behavioral manifestations of their linguistic
knowledge? And finally, Can a heritage language be successfully reacquired
in the classroom after the critical period? While extending research questions
and methodologies from second language acquisition has significantly
enlightened our current understanding of heritage language acquisition, I
will advocate for the fruitful integration of other fields to advance this
inquiry and point to potential directions in need of further research.
6
Exploring high level proficiency in SLA – the case of French L2
Inge Bartning
Stockholm University
The talk will take as a starting point a short presentation of the InterFra
corpus at Stockholm university (www.fraita.su.se/interfra) and of earlier
results of developmental stages in French L2. This presentation also includes
an ongoing joint research programme that explores features of non-
/nativelikeness, called High level proficiency in second language use at five
departments at the same university (www.biling.su.se/AAA~).
In order to contribute to the debate on native-likeness and to explain recent
results in the oral production of high level proficiency in French L2 we try to
identify domains where there still are interesting differences between L2
users and native speakers, namely formulaic language, organisation of
information structure, morpho-syntactic deviances and fluency. The data
come from three groups of advanced to near-native speakers (so called ‘late
learners’) and a native control group. Our hypothesis is that there may be
interesting interdependencies between the four domains that illustrate both