ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three neurolinguistic methods that have been used to investigate Spanish as a heritage language either during language recognition or production tasks: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and event-related potentials (ERP). It reviews current neurolinguistic research on Spanish as a heritage language. The chapter also discusses open questions for future research and discusses how neurolinguistic methodologies can be applied to important theoretical questions surrounding language acquisition generally and heritage language in particular. Although the studies the authors have summarized are all related in that they investigated heritage language processing through neurolinguistic methods, they differ in their broader conceptualization of how language is represented and processed in the brain and the type of research questions they aim to answer.
