This study investigated how immigrant parents describe and explain their family language policy concerning their child's preschool bilingual development, and also explored the factors linked to the parents' choice of bilingual or monolingual kindergarten for their child. The study design was based on a comparison of 2 groups of parents: those who…

The author discusses a study of gender assignment (noun categorization) in heritage Russian and presents issues in the methodology of heritage language study. To anticipate the conclusions of this article, the gender assignment data presented argue for the systematicity of what emerges under incomplete acquisition. The system is different from its…

Small numbers are spontaneously associated with left space and larger numbers with right space (the SNARC effect), for example when classifying numbers by parity. This effect is often attributed to reading habits but a causal link has so far never been documented. We report that bilingual Russian-Hebrew readers show a SNARC effect after reading…

The present study is an examination of the contribution of bilingualism to trilingualism, namely the influence of learning two different orthographies on learning a third. The participants were two groups of sixth graders from Israeli schools who were studying English as a foreign (second or third) language: Russian Israeli children for whom…

What makes people, in shifting power positions of a post-independence period, plan on disusing an already known L2 or learn a new L2? What are the reasons for such shifts and what outcomes can, therefore, be predicted for the future of societal bilingualism surviving alongside ongoing efforts at monolingual unification in a newly independent…

The study argues that, in addition to advantages in conscious attention-demanding processing, bilinguals may also exhibit enhanced unconscious divergent thinking. To investigate this issue, the performance of Russian-English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual native speakers was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, which…

Originating from many different sources, Russian as a heritage language in Finland displays a spectrum of developmental tendencies: both attrition and maintenance can be observed in various degrees. The Finnish educational system allows for the organization of bilingual pre-schools and schools when there are sufficient numbers of potential pupils.…

The family unit and home domain have been and remain important in heritage language maintenance efforts. There are complex relationships between parental language attitudes, their application in everyday language management activities and the children's knowledge of home language vocabulary. The present large-scale study examined the family policy…

Cross-linguistic borrowing (overt use of words from the other language) and transfer (use of semantic or syntactic structures from the other language without active switching to that language) were examined during language production in Russian-English bilinguals. Grammatical category (noun/verb) and level of concreteness were found to influence…

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of bilinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and…

This paper describes multiple Estonian-Russian language contacts in Estonia. For synchronic microsociolinguistic research it is usual to concentrate on the impact of a sociolinguistically dominant language A on an immigrant/minority language B. In the Soviet setting, the dominant language was usually Russian (despite Russians being a minority).…

Recognition and interference of a nontarget language (Russian) during production in a target language (English) were tested in Russian-English bilinguals using eye movements and picture naming. In Experiment 1, Russian words drew more eye movements and delayed English naming to a greater extent than control nonwords and English translation…

Focuses on the language situation in the Russian diaspora in Latvia and Estonia and analyzes these factors that are critical in determining language outcomes for a language community within one country that speaks a majority language of another. Examines the possibility of three outcomes: language maintenance, bilingualism, and language shift in a…

Analyzes the word order in noun phrases with a genitive modifier in the colloquial speech of the Russian diaspora in Finland. Informants are considered as either dialect speakers or non-dialect speakers. The study demonstrates how intralinguistic, interlinguistic, and extralinguistic factors operate cojointly, inducing language change. (Author/VWL)

Two eye-tracking experiments examined spoken language processing in Russian-English bilinguals. The proportion of looks to objects whose names were phonologically similar to the name of a target object in either the same language, the other language, or both languages at the same time was compared to the proportion of looks in a control condition…