Laleko, OksanaPolinsky, Maria2014-03-112013Laleko, Oksana and Maria Polinsky. 2013. Marking Topic or Marking Case: A Comparative Investigation of Heritage Japanese and Heritage Korean. Heritage Language Journal 10(2): 40-64.1550-7076http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11879946In this paper, we examine the relationship between grammatical and discourse-related domains of linguistic organization in heritage speakers by comparing their knowledge of categories mediated at different structural levels: grammatical case marking, which is mediated within the structure of the clause, and the marking of information structure, grammatically mediated at the syntax-discourse interface. To this end, we examine the knowledge of case and topic particles in heritage speakers and L2 learners of Japanese and Korean as assessed through a series of rating tasks. We find that heritage speakers in both languages experience different degrees of difficulty with elements that belong to different linguistic modules: phenomena which involve semantic and discourse computation are found to be more difficult than phenomena governed primarily by structural syntactic constraints.en-USJournal Article2014-03-11