| Summary: | This study examines the differences in the grammatical knowledge of
two types of heritage speakers of Korean. Early simultaneous bilinguals
are exposed to both English and the heritage language from
birth, whereas early sequential bilinguals are exposed to the heritage
language first and then to English upon schooling. A listening comprehension
task involving relative clauses was conducted with 51 beginning-level
Korean heritage speakers. The results showed that the
early sequential bilinguals exhibited much more accurate knowledge
than the early simultaneous bilinguals, who lacked rudimentary
knowledge of Korean relative clauses. Drawing on the findings of
adult and child Korean L1 data on the acquisition of relative clauses,
the performance of each group is discussed with respect to attrition
and incomplete acquisition of the heritage language.
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