Petición de contribuciones (revista)

Special Issue on Language Processing in Spanish Heritage Speakers

Guest Editors: Prof. Dr. Óscar Loureda (University of Heidelberg) & Dr. Olga Ivanova (University of Salamanca)

Background

Research on Spanish as a Heritage Language has gained important weight over the recent years as a unique way to get insight into linguistic, social, and cognitive underpinnings of intergenerational transmission of languages. Furthermore, the mobility of large groups of Spanish speakers across geographical areas has put the research on Spanish as a Heritage Language in the spotlight of current research, specifically concerned with how it is learnt, taught, and used. The spread of Spanish as a Heritage Language, specifically witnessed in the United States (Potowski, 2018a), has resulted so far in an extensive repertoire of demolinguistic, sociolinguistic, and applied research, aimed to understand what factors are involved into its transmission, acquisition, and use (cf. Bowles, 2022; Pascual y Cabo & Torres, 2021; Potowski, 2018b; Pozzi et al., 2021). At the same time, the growing expansion of migratory flows in both Europe and Asia (cf. Loureda et al., 2023), and across the Spanish-speaking communities themselves, is steadily increasing the interest in how the Spanish language -- and its different varieties -- are supported and learnt (Fairclough and Loureda, in press).

Compared to the extensive inquiry into the communicative practices and educational activities, the cognitive perspective on the Spanish as a Heritage Language has occupied so far a less prominent place. However, approaching the cognitive correlates of Spanish processing in heritage speakers can significantly nourish our understanding of mental processes in bilingualism, cognitive constraints in language acquisition, and the relationship between cognition and language levels. In this sense, heritage speakers make a unique model for studying how different linguistic structures and functions are embedded in cognitive processing.

Heritage speakers are heterogeneous in their linguistic development and competence (Pascual y Cabo, 2016), which is frequently predicted not only by the intensity of language input but also by the family language policy, parents’ attitudes, and the degree of implication of different agents in language transmission (Ivanova, 2024). In this scenario, approaching Spanish as a Heritage Language from the point of view of cognitive processing can allow to answer such intriguing questions as what language structures are more robust or available, against the ones that are not, or how such structures are hierarchically organized on an easy-difficult scale in heritage languages. All in all, we need these insights to understand how language processing in heritage speakers is different from that we can observe in L1 or L2 speakers (Chomón Zamora, 2022), and how to relate these differences in processing to modern theories on language competence in bilingualism (cf. Bolger & Zapata, 2011).

This Special Issue

The purpose of this Special Issue is to create a forum for sharing empirical evidence on how speakers of Spanish as a Heritage Language process different types of linguistic input. Our aim is to bring together contributions from researchers who study the processing of Spanish as a Heritage Language from different theoretical perspectives, psycholinguistic paradigms, and language structures. In such a way, we want to create a unique space to gain a comprehensive insight into how speakers process their heritage language in the light of their linguistic nature, the impact of social factors, and the typology of the contact situations. 

Call for papers

Furthermore, we invite all scholars working on Spanish as a Heritage Language processing from any theoretical or experimental perspective to contribute to the Issue with their research. We believe that this Issue will be an important step forward in the field of psycholinguistics of heritage languages by filling an important niche currently existing in the literature.

• We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution.
• Please send it to both guest editors to oscar.loureda@uni-heidelberg.de and olga.ivanova@usal.es, or to Languages editorial office (languages@mdpi.com).
• Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.
• The tentative completion schedule of this Special Issue is as follows:
  • Abstract Submission Deadline: 20 September 2024
  • Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 1 October 2024
  • Full Manuscript Submission: 20 April 2025
  • Notification of Full Manuscript Acceptance: 20 June 2025