Participants

Our sample consisted of 60 heritage bilingual participants (38 women, 22 men, M = 19.25 years) from the University of California, Riverside, and was a subset of the participants previously reported on by Macbeth et al. (2022). In addition to English (the predominant community language), the participants knew a variety of other heritage languages. The heritage languages captured in the recordings (n included in parentheses) included Amharic (1), Arabic (1), Burmese (1), Cantonese (1), Farsi (2), Hindi (1), Igbo (1), Korean (3), Mandarin (6), Portuguese (1), Punjabi (1), Spanish (24), Teochew (1), Thai (1), and Vietnamese (6). Nine participants did not use their heritage language during the recording period. All participants were exposed to their HL from birth and acquired English between birth and age 12 years (M = 3.57 years). Moreover, the majority of participants reported their HL being the language they used (76.67%) and heard (88.33%) the most during their childhood prior to entering elementary school. The study was advertised through the psychology department’s participant pool. Participants were given $25 and course credit for their participation.

Participants reported exposure to various languages in their community. Southern California is a linguistically diverse region of the United States, where heritage bilinguals may have the opportunity to be exposed to the community language, their HL, as well as other languages. Such exposure to linguistic diversity may not only provide an environment in which bilingualism is supported but may also provide linguistic experiences that shape language and cognition (Bice and Kroll, 2019; Atagi and Sandhofer, 2020). Just over half of the participants reported hearing two or more languages in the communities in which they currently reside (53.33%), with 45% of participants hearing one or more languages other than English and their HL in their current communities. Additionally, 75% of participants reported hearing two or more languages on the campus of the university they currently attend, with 60% of participants hearing one or more languages other than English and their HL on campus. Moreover, 53.33% of participants reported hearing two or more languages in the communities in which they grew up, with 48.33% of participants reporting that they heard one or more languages other than English and their HL in those childhood communities. This retrospective self-reported data was corroborated by U.S. census data: Searching census data using the ZIP codes of the residences at which participants spent the majority of their childhood, we found that–on average–participants grew up in communities in which only 45.60% (SD = 20.66%, range: 8.80–89.50%) of the population spoke only English (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018). Thus, the heritage bilinguals in this sample not only had exposure to a HL in their homes, but also were exposed to various languages in their communities.