LiVVaL Linguaggio e Variazione | Variation in Language

Series | LiVVaL
Edited book | Heritage Languages and Variation
Chapter | Grammatical Gender in Child and Adult Heritage Russian in Contact with Hebrew

Grammatical Gender in Child and Adult Heritage Russian in Contact with Hebrew

What Do We Learn About the Trajectories of Heritage Language Development?

Abstract

The current study investigated trajectories of HL-Russian grammatical development in the domain of morpho-syntax by considering (a) monolingual-like development, (b) divergent attainment (previously referred to as incomplete acquisition), (c) attrition, and (d) a birth of a new language variety in a contact situation. Adult and child HL-Russian speakers were compared to monolingual child and adult Russian speaking baseline controls.  The adjective–noun elicitation task, which taps gender assignment/agreement in real words in Russian, was used. Overall, the results indicated that Russian-speaking children showed adult-like performance.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Aug. 1, 2023 | Accepted: Nov. 16, 2023 | Published July 18, 2024 | Language: en

Keywords Grammatical genderRussianDivergent attainmentHeritage LanguageAttrition


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