Linguistic creativity in heritage speakers (original) (raw)
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Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
The present study investigated lexical production and innovation of 202 participants across six groups: child and adult heritage speakers of Russian, dominant in Hebrew or American English, and monolingual Russian-speaking children and adults. Understanding quantitative performance across these six groups was intended to provide a comprehensive perspective on heritage language (HL) development, while comparing the participants’ qualitative non-target response patterns would elucidate the organization of the HL lexicon. We assessed the production of Russian nouns and verbs using a naming task. We then considered the effects of input at the societal and lexical levels (focusing on word frequency and age of acquisition). Our findings are discussed in terms of accounts of HL developmental trajectories: monolingual-like trajectory, frozen lexical development, attrition, and new language variety in a contact situation. The results presented no evidence for attrition, while elements of the...
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2020
This paper presents an exploratory study on the use of frequency-based probabilistic word combinations in Heritage Russian. The data used in the study are drawn from three small corpora of narratives, representing the language of Russian heritage speakers from three different dominant-language backgrounds, namely German, Finnish, and American English. The elicited narratives are based on video clips that the participants saw before the recording. Since the current study is based on a relatively small corpus, we conducted a manual corpus-based analysis of the heritage corpora and an automated analysis of the baseline (monolingual) corpus to investigate the differences between the heritage and monolingual language varieties. We hypothesize that heritage speakers deploy fewer probabilistic strategies in language production compared with native speakers and that their active knowledge of and access to ready-to-use multiword units are restricted compared with native speakers. When they cannot access a single lexical item or a collocation, heritage speakers are able to tap both into the resources of the dominant language and the resources of their home language. The connection to the dominant language results in transfer-based non-standard word combinations; when heritage speakers tap into the resources of their home language, they produce unattested in the monolingual variety, ''heritage'' collocations, many of which are nevertheless grammatically legitimate.
Collocations and near-native competence: Lexical strategies of heritage speakers of Russian
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2020
This paper presents an exploratory study on the use of frequency-based probabilistic word combinations in Heritage Russian. The data used in the study are drawn from three small corpora of narratives, representing the language of Russian heritage speakers from three different dominant-language backgrounds, namely German, Finnish, and American English. The elicited narratives are based on video clips that the participants saw before the recording. Since the current study is based on a relatively small corpus, we conducted a manual corpus-based analysis of the heritage corpora and an automated analysis of the baseline (monolingual) corpus to investigate the differences between the heritage and monolingual language varieties. We hypothesize that heritage speakers deploy fewer probabilistic strategies in language production compared with native speakers and that their active knowledge of and access to ready-to-use multiword units are restricted compared with native speakers. When they c...
Applied Psycholinguistics
This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic ...
Lost in Between: The Case of Russian Heritage Speakers, Part One and Part Two
Heritage Language Journal, 2008
Abstract The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that ...
Structural Variation in Heritage Russian in Germany: Language Usage or Language Change?
Franks, S., Timberlake, A. (eds.): Selected Proceedings of Slavic Linguistic Society (SLS) 14, in Honor of Peter Kosta, Berlin et al., 2021
This paper examines transgenerational language changes in heritage Russian in Germany by describing the system-linguistic processes behind the observed diversity in heritage language usage. Because of the wide variation of individual languages usages, the paper presents heritage languages as language systems within a set of sociolinguistic variables. Building on established theoretical concepts and the author’s previous work, this paper focuses on structural borrowings and variations in word-formation. From an methodological point of view, the study uses a mixed approach, combining observations in an experimental setting with corpus data collected during field work. Key-words: heritage Russian, transgenerational language changes, structural borrowings and in word-formation