ERIC Number: EJ1433585
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Jul
Pages: 29
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0267-6583
EISSN: EISSN-1477-0326
Contrastive Focus "Is" Acquirable: An Investigation of Russian Contrastive Focus with English/Russian Bilinguals
Tania Ionin; Tatiana Luchkina; Maria Goldshtein
Second Language Research, v40 n3 p709-737 2024
This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual speakers use both contextual and prosodic cues to determine the location of contrastive focus. A follow-up experiment uses two prominence detection tasks in order to separately examine participants' sensitivity to contextual vs. prosodic cues. The findings indicate that, at higher proficiency, bilingual speakers of Russian successfully use both contextual and prosodic cues to contrastive focus; with proficiency controlled for, heritage speakers do not have an advantage over second language learners in this domain. These findings are discussed in light of cross-linguistic influence and interface vulnerability.
Descriptors: Russian, English, Adults, Language Dominance, Second Language Learning, Comparative Analysis, Language Proficiency, Cues, Contrastive Linguistics, Intonation, Suprasegmentals, Speech Communication, Transfer of Training, Bilingualism, Task Analysis, Decision Making, Syntax, Heritage Education, Participant Characteristics, Age Differences, English (Second Language), Immigrants, Language Tests
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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