Heritage Language Instruction to Young Immigrants: An In-depth Look at the Psycholinguistic Effects During the Simultaneous Acquisition of Two Second Languages.

This article examines the psycholinguistic effects of Heritage Language Instruction (HLI) on Romanian immigrant secondary students in Catalonia, focusing on its impact on heritage language (HL) attrition and second language (L2) acquisition across phonetic, morphosyntactic, lexical, semantic, and orthographic domains. The study found that HLI mitigates attrition in morphosyntactic and orthographic skills of the HL but has limited effect on lexical attrition, while also enhancing linguistic competencies in both the HL and the host community languages, Spanish and Catalan. Results suggest that HLI supports the consolidation of HL knowledge, which facilitates cross-linguistic transfer to typologically similar host languages, highlighting the importance of formal HL instruction in immigrant students' academic and social integration. The authors note limitations including sample size and linguistic proximity of the languages studied, recommending further research on HLI effects in diverse linguistic contexts and on lexical attrition.