2018 Friday Poster 6555

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Acquisition of the Grammatical Categories of Russian Verbs in a Heritage Russian-English Child: A Case Study
E. Kistanova, I. Sekerina

Heritage language (HL) acquisition is characterized by variation as a result of reduced input (Montrul, 2016; Polinsky, 2006). HL grammars undergo grammatical restructuring and are often incomplete, divergent, and reduced in comparison to the standard language (Scontras et al., 2015). It is especially noticeable in HL morphosyntax. For instance, HL Russian exhibits errors in the numeral SV agreement and loss of the subjunctive mood and the perfective-imperfective distinction (Laleko, 2010; Polinsky, 2008).

In contrast to HL speakers, monolingual Russian children rapidly acquire the verbal morphology of Russian (Ceytlin, 2000; Gagarina, 2008). By age 3, they identify the functions of the grammatical markers and demonstrate an adult-like ability to use the verbs correctly. They acquire the meanings of aspect between the ages 2;01–2;05, and Tense and 3rd person markings are acquired even earlier (1;11–2;04).

The present study tests the reduced input hypothesis in HL acquisition by investigating the Russian verbal system (aspect, tense, person, number) during the third year of a child’s life. It is the first longitudinal study of a HL Russian-English bilingual child based on 18 1-hour-long transcribed samples from our Uliyana dense corpus of naturalistic speech collected with the help of LENATM. Our research question is, whether Uliyana’s multilingual environment provides linguistic input sufficient for a typical developmental path for the grammatical categories of Russian verbs. The study used three data sources: (a) Utrecht Bilingual Language Exposure Calculator (UBiLEC) (Unsworth, 2011); (b) MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for Russian; and (c) Uliyana dense corpus. We compared Uliyana’s HL Russian milestones with those of four monolingual children (Gagarina, 2008).

Results: (a-b) UBiLEC and CDI-Rus: The HL Russian input was high for Uliyana at 2 (74%), and it increased to 87% over the year. Her active lexicon started with 16 verbs (the norm: 32), but by age 3, it grew to 102 verbs (the ceiling for the norm). (c) Uliyana’s corpus contains 303 verbs and 1794 uses, with the average number of verbs per utterance 0.19–0.75. Table 1 reveals striking similarities between the monolingual children (Gagarina, 2008) and Uliyana. Thus, despite the hypothesized reduced HL input (bilingual Russian-English), Uliyana follows the typical developmental path of the acquisition of the grammatical categories in the Russian verbal system.

The stages that monolingual Russian children and our bilingual HL Russian-English participant go through in producing the verb forms are remarkably similar from the form reproduction stage (Gagarina, 2008) to the acquisition of the full system and exceptions although the timing varies. Furthermore, shared overregularization errors suggest that children acquiring HLs can detect regularities in the reduced input and produce novel verb forms in a timely manner.

References

Cejtlin, S. N. (2000). Jazyk i rebjonok. Lingvistika detskoj rechi. (in Russian) [Language and child.The linguistics of the child’s speech.]. Moscow.

Gagarina, N. V. (2008). Stanovlenie grammaticheskih kategorij russkogo glagola v detskoj rechi. (in Russian) [Verb categories in first language acquisition of Russian.]. St. Petersburg: Nauka.

Laleko, O. V. (2010). The syntax-pragmatics interface in language loss: Covert restructuring of aspect in Heritage Russian. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota.

Montrul, S. (2016). The Acquisition of Heritage Languages. Cambridge University Press. Polinsky, M. (2006). Incomplete acquisition: American Russian. Journal of Slavic linguistics, 191-262.

Polinsky, M. (2008). Without aspect. Case and grammatical relations, 263-282.

Scontras, G., Fuchs, Z., & Polinsky, M. (2015). Heritage language and linguistic theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1545. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01545.

Unsworth, S. (2011). Utrecht Bilingual Language Exposure Calculator. Utrecht University.