Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Heritage language development: Dominant language transfer and the sociopolitical context -- Part I: Experimental studies -- Chapter 2 Ultimate attainment in long-immersed heritage Italian immigrants: Syntactic and semantic knowledge of direct object clitics and partitive ne -- Chapter 3 Grammatical competence in adult heritage speakers of Italian and adult immigrants: A comparative study -- Chapter 4 Ultimate attainment of gender in heritage and L2 Italian -- Chapter 5 Auxiliary selection in heritage speakers of Italian -- Chapter 6 The acquisition of syntactic structures in heritage Italian: Assessing the role of language exposure at critical periods -- Chapter 7 The expression of (deontic and epistemic) modality in Italian as heritage language in Germany -- Part II: Observational studies -- Chapter 8 Italian as heritage language in third generations on social networks: Morphosyntactic code-switching features -- Chapter 9 Discourse markers in heritage Italian spoken in Flanders -- Chapter 10 Auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance heritage languages: Argentina and the UK -- Conclusion and future directions -- Index