The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children.…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

Despite considerable evidence suggesting that second language (L2) learners experience difficulties when processing morphosyntactic aspects of L2 in online tasks, the mechanisms underlying these difficulties remain unknown. The aim of this dissertation is to explore possible causes for the difficulties by comparing attentional mechanisms engaged…

This study examines the motion verb system of Bulgarian, focusing both on the structure of the Bulgarian motion verb itself, and on the information typically encoded in the Bulgarian verb of motion. It then compares the Bulgarian motion verb system with the motion verb systems of two other Slavic languages, Russian and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian…

Tests the subjective reactions of standard Russian speakers and American English speakers to regional pronunciation. Homogeneously-grouped subjects listened to a series of recorded voices and rated each speaker for various attributes on a numerical scale. These attributes included competence, personal integrity, and social attractiveness. (CK)

A detailed view of the various uses in Russian of the conjunction "poka" is developed in this article. Frequent examples illustrate clausal relationships, negative constructions, aspect, and tense in typical "poka" constructions. The principal function of "poka" is related to the linguistic concept of simultaneity, and the standard dictionary…

A study investigated linguistic and non-linguistic conventions of communication between Russians and North Americans and explored how aspects of culture and its institutions are encoded in symbolic meanings in 16 cultural themes (food, money, space, possessions, work, courtesy, marriage, friendship, dating, studying, time, humor, small talk,…

Investigates the influence of linguistic structure on non-linguistic cognition by comparing Russian and English behavior on tasks involving the color blue. Russians, who differentiate this region into "dark blue" and "light blue," were expected to separate blues more often than English subjects for whom the colors belong to one lexical category.…

The range and characteristics of learning strategies used in studying foreign languages were studied in a 3-year project involving 67 high school students of Spanish and 34 college students of Russian. This final report reviews second language acquisition theory and learning strategies, research in learning strategies, and a cognitive model of…