The Russian suffix -sja presents a learnability problem: a single morpheme signals five distinct argument-structure alternations (anticausative, reflexive, antipassive, reciprocal, and impersonal). How do monolingual and bilingual children acquire this complex form-function mapping? We report a longitudinal corpus study of 13 Russian-speaking children (five monolinguals and eight bilinguals) examining the emergence, distribution, and productivity of each sja-type. Three main findings emerge. First, children show a productivity hierarchy: anticausative and reflexive occur with many different verbs, whereas reciprocal and impersonal are largely confined to a few high-frequency items. Second, impersonal -sja is uniquely difficult, emerging latest and showing the lowest productivity overall. Third, contrary to predictions from heritage language research, bilingual children in our corpus show no deficit relative to monolinguals (and in fact show earlier emergence across the board). These findings suggest that the bilingual divergence from the monolingual baseline must emerge after early childhood.
Linguistic interference in the oral and written production of balanced Kazakh–Russian bilinguals within Kazakhstan’s trilingual education context are investigated in this study. Despite extensive documentation concerned with interference phenomena, prior research has rarely systematically compared modalities or integra...
A. Maimakova, Alla Tsoy, Lyudmila Vladimirovna Beschetnova et al.· Theory and Practice in Langu...· 0 citations
This article addresses the acquisition of the category of negation in Russian by two distinct groups of learners – non-native speakers and heritage speakers. Drawing on corpus-based data from the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC), the study explores structural and developmental patterns in the use of negation across differe...
This article presents a longitudinal case study of want-constructions in an English–Russian bilingual child whose early language was characterized by prolonged pronoun reversal (i.e., using you for self-reference). The analysis focuses on want-constructions used during a period in which canonical English imperatives we...
Although prior research suggests that suprasegmental phonological awareness contributes to English learners’
acquisition of lexical stress, less attention has been paid to morphological awareness and how learners’ first language (L1)
shapes this ability, particularly since morpho-phonological cues change how stress...
Ka-Keung Lee, Magdalena Ivok, H. Yeung· Journal of Second Language P...· 0 citations
Introduction: Multilingual speakers frequently report that operating in a different language involves more than a change in grammatical system. The phenomenon at issue is linguistic frame switching (LFS): the involuntary reorganisation of cognitive, emotional, and identity-relevant schemas when a multilingual speaker m...
Judith Zangerle· Academia Neuroscience and Br...· 0 citations
This study examined child heritage speakers’ production of verbs in the second-person singular (2
sg
) preterit. Twenty bilingual children completed an elicited production task targeting 2
sg
preterit forms, which vary between standard and non-standard productions like
tuviste
and
tuvistes
. Overall, childr...
Elisabeth Baker Martínez· Heritage Language Journal· 0 citations
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