Authors: Larisa Avram, Alexandru Mardale and Elena Soare
Summary: Heritage Romanian plays an important role in preserving the cultural identity of children born into Romanian families living outside their homeland. Research on the acquisition and maintenance of heritage Romanian contributes to a better understanding of language contact and bilingual development. It provides valuable data to both linguistic theory and decision- makers involved in teaching Romanian as a heritage language. The paper Anaphoric biases of null and overt pronominal subjects in child heritage Romanian investigated the interpretation of overt and null subjects in while clauses (e.g. Rața o salută pe pisică în timp ce ea merge/ în timp ce _ merge cu bicicleta. ‘The duck is greeting the cat while she is riding the bicycle.’) by Romanian-French bilingual children (ages 7-10 years), who reside in France and speak Romanian as a heritage language. They all attend optional classes of Romanian language and civilization. The results indicate that heritage speakers showed progress in the comprehension of subjects, even after the onset of schooling in French – the societal language – when exposure to Romanian becomes even more limited. A comparison with age-matched monolingually raised children living in Romania revealed a similar response pattern. More generally, these findings provide evidence that reduced input does not preclude successful heritage language acquisition, particularly when learners have access to formal heritage language instruction.