Commentary published In: Epistemological issue: What returnee bilinguals may teach us about language attrition, language stabilization, and individual variation
Edited by Matthew T. Carlson and Jorge González Alonso
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 16:1] 2026
► pp. 68–72
Commentary
The other side of the coin
Linguistic complexity as a potential cause for selective reinforcement in the heritage language of returnee speakers
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Goethe University Frankfurt.
Published online: 28 November 2025
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.25068.rin
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.25068.rin
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Flores, C., Sopata, A., & Rinke, E. (2025). The impact of change of environment on Polish–German returnees’ childhood languages. Effects of attrition and reinforcement on lexical knowledge. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 28(8), 960–979.
Flores, C., & Snape, N. (2025). What returnee bilinguals may teach us about language attrition, language stabilization, and individual variation. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
Meisel, J. M. (2011). First and second language acquisition: Parallels and differences. Cambridge University Press.
Rinke, E., Flores, C. & Torregrossa, J. (2024). How different types of complexity can account for difficult structures in bilingual and monolingual language acquisition. In M. Polinsky, & M. T. Putnam (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Complexity in Heritage Language Grammars. Language Science Press.
Tsimpli, I. M. (2014). Early, late or very late?: Timing acquisition and bilingualism, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 4(3), 283–313.
