Gender Under Incomplete Acquisition: Heritage Speakers' Knowledge of Noun Categorization

Incomplete competence in first language is an intriguing problem, one that subsumes interrupted acquisition, delayed acquisition, and language loss. Incomplete or interrupted acquisition is represented by heritage speakers, who only recently have been recognized as a group separate from those bilinguals for whom one of the languages is strongly dominant. In the last decade, heritage speakers have come to the fore in a number of fields, from language teaching (Kagan & Dillon, 2001; Bermel & Kagan, 2000; Geisherik, 2005) to sociolinguistics (Andrews, 1999; Fenyvesi, 2005; Seliger & Vago, 1991, among many others) to general linguistics (Dorian, 1989; Seliger & Vago, 1991) and psycholinguistics (Sorace, 2004; Tsimpli et al., 2004). Understanding the nature of incomplete acquisition is crucial for our understanding of acquisition, and it is fair to say that heritage speakers provide a crucial missing link between competent L1 learners, balanced bilinguals, and possibly L2 learners. Since very little is actually known about heritage language speakers, studying different aspects of language structure in this population is important. In addition to the challenge of uncovering descriptive generalizations needed to understand incomplete acquisition, the heritage population poses another challenge to language researchers: it is not always clear how to assess what it is that heritage speakers do and do not know in their first language, so developing replicable methodology of language investigation is also essential for heritage language studies as a field.