Heritage Portuguese learners' performance with derivational morphology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18364/rc.2025n69.1454Parole chiave:
heritage language, morphological awareness, transferability, familiarityAbstract
There are very few studies on derivational morphology with heritage speakers. This paper intends to narrow this gap in heritage Portuguese studies. This work focuses on testing the performance of adult Portuguese heritage learners in a college setting with derivational words. I used a multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank task, and the results show that heritage learners significantly perform better when words can be transferred from English and are colloquial in Portuguese. They perform significantly worse when derivational words cannot be transferred from English and are non-colloquial in Portuguese. One suggestion to increase greater performance with derivational words is to explicitly teach morphological awareness to heritage learners of Portuguese in heritage Portuguese language courses to increase vocabulary.
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