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INTRODUCTION
In the context of minority language acquisition research, use of the terms heritage speaker and heritage language is on the increase. According to standard definitions, a heritage language is acquired as a minority language within a majority language environment through naturalistic exposure in the home context (e.g. Rothman, 2009: 156). The terms heritage speaker and heritage language have originally been used with reference to larger minorities, e.g. immigrants from Latin-America, Russia or South Korea to the US, and it has been claimed that the heritage (or minority) language may be subject to 'incomplete acquisition', i.e. 'non-nativelike attainment' (Montrul, 2008). In Polinsky's (1997: 371) terms, incomplete acquisition means that 'a given grammar system undergoes a significant reduction [. . .] when it is passed on from one generation to the next'.
This study compares simultaneous bilinguals (henceforth 2L1s) who have grown up as heritage speakers of French (where German was the majority language) with speakers who have grown up as majority speakers of French (speaking German as a minority language). Contrary to claims raised in previous research, we show that heritage speakers are native-like in the domain of morpho-syntax. At the same time, their pronunciation tends to be perceived as non-native.
There have been many case studies on the development of French as a minority language, supporting the view that with consistent use of the minority language bilingual development is qualitatively like monolingual development (see the contributions in Meisel, 1990, 1994 and the overview in De Houwer, 1995). These studies include children that match the definition of heritage speakers, although the term itself has not been used to describe them. The apparent contradiction between the aforementioned studies on adult bilinguals, showing incomplete acquisition, and child bilinguals, whose development resembles that of monolinguals, could mean two different things. Perhaps bilingual children acquire the heritage language completely but lose parts of it once entering school under massive majority-language input. For generative acquisition research, at least in syntax, this should be a rather unwanted assumption, because syntactic acquisition is assumed to be regulated by parameters, which are set early in life. Once these parameters are fixed, resetting is extremely costly or even impossible (Müller, 1993; Meisel, 1995). Alternatively, different...