This study investigates how "phonological neighborhood density" (PND) affects word production and recognition in 4-to-6-year-old Russian children in comparison to adults. Previous experiments with English-speaking adults showed that a dense neighborhood facilitated word production but inhibited recognition whereas a sparse neighborhood…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

Morphophonological alternations can make target-like production of grammatical morphemes challenging due to changes in form depending on the phonological environment. This article explores the acquisition of morphophonological alternations involving the interacting patterns of vowel deletion and stress shift in Russian-speaking children (aged…

This study investigated the effect of the first language (L1) on the visual word recognition of inflected nouns in second language (L2) Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. Case inflection is common in Russian and in Finnish but nonexistent in Chinese. Several models have been posited to describe L2 morphological processing. The unified…

This study tests the hypothesis that distributional information can guide infants in the generalization of word order movement rules at the initial stage of language acquisition. Participants were 11- and 14-month-old infants. Stimuli were sentences in Russian, a language that was unknown to our infants. During training the word order of each…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive analysis of gender assignment in Contemporary Standard Russian within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The result of the dissertation is the establishment of the phonological, morphological, semantic, and faithfulness constraints necessary to assign…

This study describes how intermediate-level first language English readers of Russian as a second language deploy lexical inferencing and other strategies when reading informational texts. Fifth-semester students of Russian performed think-alouds while reading two texts; one written for the general adult reader, and the other meant for school-age…

With Russian as the target language, a proof of concept study was undertaken to determine whether it is possible to identify linguistic features, control over which is implicated in progress on the Interagency Linguistic Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale, thereby better to inform the instructional process. Following its development in an…

This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17-55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities…

Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10-4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their…

Alaska, with its history of Russian colonization, has a large stock of Russian loanwords. The majority of the loanwords discussed are for cultural and concrete items and are substances, emerging as noun words, to which paragogic endings are agglutinated. (NCR)

Two hypotheses of generative phonology are discussed regarding symmetry and regularity: alternations parallel in distribution are phonologically parallel, even if not phonetically so; and alternations are generated from a single underlying segment. The validity of these assumptions is examined in palatalization alternations in contemporary…

Suggests that teaching of Russian phonology and morphology be based on the twelve vowel-units and twenty consonant-units that are the basis of conventional Russian spelling. Paradigms of inflected words should be presented in terms of stems plus endings. (CHK)