Object realization across generations. A closer look on the spontaneous speech of Portuguese first and second generation migrants

Abstract

[Excerpt] Introduction: The present study investigates object realization in the Portuguese of Portuguese migrants who live in Germany. We specifically focus on two distinct groups of speakers: 1st generation migrants who moved to the host country as adults, i.e. late second language (L2) learners of German, and 2nd generation speakers who were born in Germany, and acquired Portuguese as their heritage language (HL) in parallel with German as their dominant environmental language. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the realization of objects in the spontaneous speech of these speaker groups and to compare it with the spontaneous production of two age-matched generations of monolingual speakers of European Portuguese (EP) who live in Portugal. We intend to detect potential differences in the linguistic behavior of heritage speakers (HSs) and, in this way, to contribute to the understanding of heritage language acquisition. [...]