This study investigated three key issues in heritage language (HL) research. Previous research shows HL speakers have an advantage on oral production tasks compared to L2 speakers who instead perform better on written tasks. Furthermore, both L2 and HL speakers are claimed to have a "yes-bias" towards retaining ungrammaticality in GJTs.…

Finland is constitutionally bilingual and there are several small minority languages. With recent migration from different parts of the world, the linguistic environment has become even more diversified. National curricula take linguistic diversity among the pupils into consideration and stress the importance of supporting pupils' language…

The current study examines bilingual children as language policy agents in the interplay between official language policy and education policy at three Swedish-medium preschools in Finland. For this purpose we monitored nine Finnish-Swedish bilingual children aged 3 to 5 years for 18 months. The preschools were located in three different parts of…

The aim of this study was to determine whether the type of bilingualism affects neural organisation. We performed identification experiments and mismatch negativity (MMN) registrations in Finnish and Swedish language settings to see, whether behavioural identification and neurophysiological discrimination of vowels depend on the linguistic…

We investigated the behavioral and brain responses (ERPs) of bilingual word recognition to three fundamental psycholinguistic factors, frequency, morphology, and lexicality, in early bilinguals vs. monolinguals. Earlier behavioral studies have reported larger frequency effects in bilinguals' nondominant vs. dominant language and in some studies…

Community language schools are complementary schools set up and run by minority communities in Australia. They aim to assist in intergenerational language and identity transmission, but previous research has indicated that these schools position their students in monolingual ways that contradicts how bilingual speakers use their language in…

This study investigates the effects of weekly heritage language (HL) classes on first language (L1) proficiency in speakers who arrived in the second language (L2)-dominant setting before the onset of puberty. Two groups of L1 Spanish--L2 Swedish bilingual high school students living in Sweden participated in the study. One group currently…

Discusses the social and linguistic problems of children living in Sweden who have at least one Italian immigrant parent. (CFM)

This study investigated how Finnish-Swedish bilingual 10-year-olds (n=26) produce self-repairs in a narrative discourse, in comparison with monolingual agemates (n=10), in three respects: (1) types of repair; (2) number of repairs; and (3) the structural organization of repair. Altogether, 36 Finnish and 36 Swedish narratives were examined. The…

Lexical interference in the recall of adult Finnish/Swedish bilinguals with Finnish dominant is studied. The error patterns of short-term recall of words presented by category in either Swedish or Finnish were examined for translations, lexical substitutions, and intrusions or false recalls of non-occurring words. Individual differences in…

The results of two experimental studies of interference in German-Swedish bilingual and trilingual high school students are presented. Both were developmental studies with length of residence in Sweden as the main independent variable. The purpose was to follow the developmental changes in intra- and interlingual interference and to find out if…