We investigate German-Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system,…

This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using…

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…

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6-4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children…

This article presents the results of four studies exploring the acquisition of the language-specific syntactic and semantic properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam, languages that behave differently with respect to the syntax and semantics of multiple interrogatives. A corpus analysis investigated the frequency of…

This dissertation compares the knowledge of Russian Verbal Aspect in two types of learners enrolled in college level Russian courses: foreign language learners of Russian whose native language is English and heritage language speakers of Russian whose dominant language at the time of study is English. Russian Aspect is known to be problematic both…

This study provides an account for a long-term selective loss of L1 (Russian) morpho-syntactic and content components in early immigrants to the U.S. The analysis of naturally occurring data is carried out from the perspective of two theoretical approaches--three models developed within language contact (Myers-Scotton 2002, 2005) and the…

This study investigates ultimate attainment at the syntax-discourse interface in adult second-language (L2) acquisition. In total, 91 L1 (first-language) English, L1 Dutch and L1 Russian advanced-to-near-native speakers of German and 63 native controls are tested on an acceptability judgement task and an on-line self-paced reading task. These…

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…

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…

Examined Russian-speaking children's knowledge of syntactic and discourse-related restrictions on the interpretation of pronouns in subjunctive clauses. Eighteen children (4-5 years of age) participated in a truth-value judgment task. In constructions in which syntactic knowledge is implicated, children's performance is very similar to that of…

ONE APPROACH TO CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IS THAT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL, GENERATIVE GRAMMAR WHICH EMPHASIZES MAN'S ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND AND PRODUCE AN UNLIMITED VARIETY OF SENTENCES THROUGH CONTROL OF A LIMITED NUMBER OF LANGUAGE RULES. THUS, A CHILD LEARNS TO SPEAK BY DEVELOPING HIS OWN THEORIES OF THE STRUCTURE OF HIS LANGUAGE. STUDIES OF…

Presents evidence for a theory that children learning Russian at a certain age know a syntactic principle that governs the distribution of pronouns, but that they do not know a pragmatic or semantic principle that restricts the situations in which noun phrases may be contraindexed. (Contains 48 references.) (JP)

The research resumes presented here comprise the responses received by the Stanford Child Language Project to a general request for reports on research in progress. These reports include all those distributed at the Child Language Research Forum in April 1973. The resumes cover a wide range of topics and present, in order, the following…

This annotated bibliography lists approximately 100 books, reports, Rand memoranda, and papers, written between 1961 and 1971, in the fields of linguistic theory, language research, computational linguistics, and formal linguistics. Many documents involve the use of computers in problems of language analysis; many concern the analysis of Russian.…