Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study investigates how heritage speakers conduct ‘good-enough' processing at the interface of home-language proficiency, cognitive skills, and task types. For this purpose, we employ two word-order patterns of two clausal constructions in Korean (suffixal passive; morphological causative) which differ in the mapping between thematic roles and case-marking and the interpretive procedures driven by verbal morphology. We find that, while Korean heritage speakers demonstrate the same kind of acceptability-rating behaviour as monolingual Korean speakers do, their reading-time patterns are notably modulated by construction-specific properties, cognitive skills, and proficiency. This suggests a heritage speaker's ability and willingness to conduct both parsing routes, induced by linguistic cues in a non-dominant language, which are proportional to the computational complexity involving these cues.