Russian noun pluralization in bilingual children: Evidence from four countries. Part 1. Qualitative analysis

Abstract

The Russian language is confronted with a variety of other languages from around the world on the individual level. Russian is spoken by a large proportion of the population in some countries. As a result, it is necessary to investigate how the home / family or the first language (L1) interacts with the language of the environment in early childhood and how this influences the acquisition results at various stages. The aim of the study was: (1) to compare the pattern of noun pluralization in Russian (L1) among monolingual Russian-speaking and bilingual (L1) Russian-speaking children; (2) to examine the possible role of L2 background in production of noun plurals in L1 Russian. The participants included four groups of 4- to 5-year-old bilingual children with Russian as L1 and English, German, Finnish, or Hebrew as L2, who were compared to monolingual children in Russia in two age groups (3–4 and 4–5 years of age). A semi-structured elicitation test was conducted. Our findings revealed no qualitative difference between the groups on noun pluralization. Even if this is the case, some minor negative influence was evident in the children with English as L2, which is characterized by most regular noun pluralization. The presence of a grammar category in L2 plays the central role in the acquisition of this category in L1. Still, it is not clear what the role of L2 is: maybe the bilingual children are so good with Russian plural marking because their L2 has plural marking or because Russian is their dominant language and they have had a lot more input in it, so that the status of their L2 is irrelevant. The article actually consists of two parts, each dealing with qualitative and quantitative analysis, respectively.

Keywords

• plural of the Russian nouns
• child language development
• bilingualism
• regular endings
• cross-linguistic comparison
• acquisition errors