A growing interest has emerged among researchers and educators to better understand the nature of heritage language learners’ grammars and linguistic experience. In this chapter, we provide an overview of how heritage bilinguals’ early experience with a family language that is a minority language leads to divergent grammar outcomes vis-à-vis monolingual norms. We do this by focusing specifically on 14 studies that included advanced proficient heritage speakers to compare this groups’ linguistic behavior with that of other proficiency levels and bilingual profiles; we pay special attention to the proficiency measures used in the studies. Further, and based on preliminary evidence, we argue that heritage language learners respond differently to pedagogical interventions in (re)learning their heritage language as adults, and that research on pedagogical interventions needs to be extended beyond the bilingual's two languages to investigate heritage speakers’ experiences in learning additional languages. We conclude with some recommendations for future research to increase our knowledge on the dynamics among heritage languages, proficiency levels, and instructional contexts.
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