A Four-Year Longitudinal Comparative Study on the Lexicon Development of Russian and Turkish Heritage Speakers in Germany

Abstract

Russian and Turkish are the most frequently spoken and intensively investigated heritage languages in Germany, but contrastive research on their development in early childhood is still missing. This longitudinal study compares the trajectories of expressive lexicon development in Russian (n = 70) and Turkish (n = 79) heritage speakers and identifies predictors for their lexicon size at preschool age. Heritage lexicon size was tested with two comparable tests assessing the expressive lexicon at four test points between the mean ages of 3.3 (range: 25–49 months) and 5.6 (range: 54–78 months) years. The influence of language-related factors, such as input quantity, parents’ heritage language proficiency and age of onset (AoO) of German, and other potential predictors, i.e., intelligence and socio-economic status, is evaluated. Results show that the Turkish group’s abilities grow slower but are similar at the last test point. Common predictors for lexicon size are input quantity from siblings and AoO. Group-specific influences are parental input quantity in the Russian group and siblings’ proficiency in the Turkish group. Our findings emphasize the interplay of input quantity and society language AoO for heritage lexicon development. The relevance of our results for the usage-based theory of language acquisition is discussed.

Russian heritage language development in narrative contexts: Evidence from pre- and primary-school children in Norway, Germany, and the UK

“…Both are comparative studies of lexical development in Russian and Turkish HLs, showing that the migrant community characteristics mediate HL acquisition in important ways. In the longitudinal sample of Russian 2-4-yearolds (n = 70), Czapka et al (2021) observe a significant growth of expressive vocabulary over the course of four testing times. The children's societal language, German, was not tested, but importantly, a later age of onset of German as well as more HL input from siblings were found to be significant predictors of vocabulary size in RHL.…”

“…Previous research on RHL addressed certain aspects of vocabulary acquisition based on narrative, experimental, and longitudinal data ( Bar-Shalom and Zaretsky, 2008 ; Gagarina et al, 2014 ; Klassert et al, 2014 ; Ringblom and Dobrova, 2019 ; Makarova and Terekhova, 2020 ; Montanari et al, 2020 ; Czapka et al, 2021 ). Several of the studies have been conducted in Germany, where Russian is one of the most frequently spoken and intensively investigated HLs.…”

Case marking is different in monolingual and heritage Bosnian in digitally elicited oral texts

“…The effect of HL input and use on the development of the HL in children has been shown to influence the speed and manner of acquisition across different linguistic domains such as vocabulary, morphosyntax and semantics (Thomas and Gathercole, 2005;Gathercole and Thomas, 2009;Paradis et al, 2011;La Morgia, 2015;Montrul, 2015;Unsworth, 2015Unsworth, , 2016Gagarina and Klassert, 2018;Kupisch, 2019;Czapka et al, 2021;Makrodimitris and Schulz, 2021). Variation in the quantity and quality of input as discussed above is considered by some the fundamental determinant of the interindividual variation observed in bilingual language acquisition (Paradis, 2011).…”

“…In this study, we investigate case morphology marking in adult heritage speakers, compared to monolingual speakers. We also consider various linguistic and non-linguistic factors that have previously been found to influence accuracy of morphosyntax in heritage languages: L2 age of onset ( Anderson, 1999 ; Gagarina and Klassert, 2018 ), input and usage of the heritage language ( Gathercole and Thomas, 2009 ; Kupisch, 2019 ; Czapka et al, 2021 ), and Socio-Economic Status (SES) ( Sánchez, 1983 ; Cobo-Lewis et al, 2002 ).…”

“…The quantity of HL input is known to affect vocabulary size as well as diversity of produced morphemes: children receiving more input are reported to perform better than those with less input ( Gathercole and Thomas, 2009 ; Unsworth, 2015 , 2016 ; Czapka et al, 2021 ). Importantly, Gagarina and Klassert (2018) and Makrodimitris and Schulz (2021) report the use of the HL at home to be a significant predictor for the grammar domains under investigation in their respective studies.…”