Recent research has demonstrated that L2 learners and heritage speakers might have two different profiles in terms of their syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical-semantic knowledge of a target language (Montrul, 2004, 2006, 2010; Montrul, Foote, & Perpinan, 2008). However, the most influential of the major studies have been limited to Spanish. To expand our understandings of the incompleteness of heritage and L2 language learning from implicit and explicit knowledge perspectives (Bowles, 2011), this study investigated the differences and/or similarities between two learner groups of Korean in their knowledge of 17 target structures. One hundred fourteen learners were recruited in three groups: 65 L2 learners, 38 heritage language (HL) learners, and 11 native speakers of Korean. This research utilized an elicited imitation test (EIT), a narrative test, and an untimed aural Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) to measure implicit knowledge, and a metalinguistic knowledge test, a written untimed GJT, and a C-test to gauge explicit knowledge of the 17 Korean target structures. The results of a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) demonstrated that the EIT and the aural GJT significantly explained the participants’ implicit knowledge of the target structures, whereas the written GJT, metalinguistic test, and C-test accounted for their explicit knowledge of the grammar topics. Further analyses showed that HL learners outperformed L2 learners when the scores of the EIT and aural GJT were combined, highlighting HL learners’ superior implicit knowledge of the target structures. Regarding explicit knowledge of the target structures, L2 learners showed significantly better performances in the combined scores of the written GJT, metalinguistic knowledge test, and C-test. However, the L2 and HL groups did not demonstrate significant differences for the aural and written GJTs. Overall, the results of this study showed that 1) the HL and L2 learners’ linguistic knowledge of Korean have significantly different knowledge profiles in terms of the implicit-explicit dichotomy of knowledge, and 2) in addition to a time constraint and grammaticality, manipulating testing mode—aural or written—could be another valid factor to measure implicit and explicit knowledge relatively separately.
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