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…

Expanded version of a paper presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association meeting, Philadelphia, Pa., April 2, 1971. (RL)

The goal of the study is to analyze the morphological processing of real and novel verb forms by heritage speakers of Russian in order to determine whether it differs from that of native (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners; if so, how it is different; and which factors may guide the acquisition process. The experiment involved three…

This study introduces a typological model of the "conceptual language-specific approach" to the L2 research on the acquisition of tense-aspect. The model is based on the typological notion of prominence, classifying languages into tense-prominent and aspect-prominent (Bhat 1999) and the L1 research proposal that language-specific…

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…

This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words "one," "two," and "three." First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use.…

This paper documents the occurrence of form variability through diminutive "wordplay", and examines whether this variability facilitates or hinders morphology acquisition in a richly inflected language. First, in a longitudinal speech corpus of eight Russian mothers conversing with their children (1.6-3.6), and with an adult, the use of diminutive…

Uses six examples to substantiate the hypothesis that masculine root words in reference to males in Russian cover a broader semantic space than do feminine root words in reference to females. Women share in the same wide space only when implicitly included in a masculine root. (Author/BK)

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 of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to…

CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN VERB STEMS ENDING IN "I" HAVE TWO VARIANT NONFINAL SUFFIXES TO MARK IMPERFECTIVE ASPECT, "IVAJ" AND "AJ." PURELY PHONOLOGICAL FACTORS DO NOT SEEM TO DETERMINE WHICH PREFIX IS USED AND THERE IS LITTLE EVIDENCE FOR A CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A PARTICULAR PREFIX AND A PREFERRED SUFFIX. IN MANY…

This article discusses presentation of Russian conjugation via the one-stem system advocated by Lipson and Townsend, and attempts a more unified and complete presentation of irregularities in imperfect derivation. Two major irregularities are occurrence of an unexpected suffix and unpredictable alternation in the root of the derived imperfective.…

Examines the way the temporal adverbial factor restricts and clarifies the form and aspectuality of the Russian verb. The morphological aspect is one of a set of factors whose interaction determines the aspectual reading of a sentence. (NCR)

Homographs are defined in this study as sets of word forms which are spelled alike but which have entirely or partially different meanings and which may have different syntactic functions (that is, they belong to more than one form class or to more than one subclass of a form class). This report deals with the classification and identification of…