The impact of internal and external factors on linguistic performance in the home language and in L2 among Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children

Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Walters, Joel; Gagarina, Natalia

doi:10.1075/lab.1.3.04arm

Cited by 123 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…L1 input is usually reduced and significantly determines the development of this language. This has been shown by several studies exploring the influence of input parameters on L1 development in ratings of general language skills (De Houwer, 2007) and lexical (Pearson et al, 1997;Klassert and Gagarina, 2010;Armon-Lotem et al, 2011;Hoff et al, 2012) or grammatical skills (Gutiérrez-Clellen and Kreiter, 2003;Gathercole and Thomas, 2009;Klassert and Gagarina, 2010;Armon-Lotem et al, 2011;Hoff et al, 2012;Thomas et al, 2014;Flores and García, 2017;Rodina and Westergaard, 2017).…”

Section: Impact Of L1 Input and Background Factors On L1 Developmentmentioning

confidence: 80%

Input Dominance and Development of Home Language in Russian-German Bilinguals

Gagarina

Klassert

2018

Front. Commun.

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Bilingual children experience a rapid shift in language preference and input dominance from L1 to L2 upon entering kindergarten when regular contact with L2 starts. Though this change in dominance affects further L1 development, little is known about how various factors shape this. The present study examines the combined influence of different background factors including not only chronological age, age of onset of L2 (L2 AoO), and gender, but also various L1 input measures on L1 receptive and expressive lexical and morphological (case and verb inflections) development in Russian-German bilingual children. For lexical skills, we found a general strong impact of chronological age, gender, and input factors but a differential impact of L2 AoO. Only expressive lexical skills were influenced by language dominance. Morphological development was influenced in the following way: chronological age and gender were most relevant for the acquisition of verb inflection, whereas age, L1 use in the nuclear family and L2 AoO affected the acquisition of case on nouns. This pattern explains the findings of the second series of analyses of longitudinal data, which showed that case is more vulnerable than verb inflection to language attrition-or, taking another perspective-to heritage Russian grammar restructuring.

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Section: Impact Of L1 Input and Background Factors On L1 Developmentmentioning

confidence: 80%

Input Dominance and Development of Home Language in Russian-German Bilinguals

Gagarina

Klassert

2018

Front. Commun.

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“…). Similarly, whereas chronological age has been shown to lead to improvement of HL performance (e.g.,Armon-Lotem, Walters, & Gagarina, 2011;Flores, 2015;Flores, Santos, Jesus, & Marques, 2017), other studies have found no or…”

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confidence: 89%

Case marking and word order in Greek heritage children

Chondrogianni

Schwartz

2020

J. Child Lang.

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This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to twelve-year-old Greek heritage children in New York City and a control group of age-matched monolingual children living in Greece participated in a production and a picture verification task targeting case marking and (non-)canonical word order in Greek. HL children produced syncretic inflectional errors, also found in preschool monolingual children. In the comprehension task, HL children showed variable performance on the non-canonical OVS but ceiling performance on the SVO conditions, which suggests influence from English. Linguistic factors such as case transparency affected comprehension, whereas child-level factors such as proficiency and degree of (early) use of Greek influenced performance on both modalities.

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“…The literature on language development of bilingual children has consistently shown that one of the most important languageexternal factors predicting bilingual language acquisition is the amount of exposure (Gathercole and Thomas, 2005;Guiberson et al, 2006;Armon-Lotem et al, 2011;Blom and Vasić, 2011;Chondrogianni and Marinis, 2011;Paradis, 2011;Anderson, 2012;Unsworth, 2013Unsworth, , 2015Paradis and Jia, 2016, among many others). In a setting with one dominant societal language and a minority language, a child's input is typically divided between the two languages and comes from two main sources: home and school.…”

Section: Language-external Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 Some varieties of Norwegian still have a traditional three-gender system of masculine, feminine, and neuter, but many dialects have lost the feminine, including the dialects where data collection took place (Oslo and Tromsø). the acquisition of gender (Gathercole and Thomas, 2005;Armon-Lotem et al, 2011;Chondrogianni and Marinis, 2011;Paradis, 2011;Unsworth et al, 2014;Mitrofanova et al, 2018). The amount and quality of input is related to the success or failure in language acquisition (for an overview see Armon-Lotem and Meir, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Internal and External Factors in Heritage Language Acquisition: Evidence From Heritage Russian in Israel, Germany, Norway, Latvia and the United Kingdom

et al. 2020

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In this paper, we consider elicited production data (real and nonce words tasks) from five different studies on the acquisition of grammatical gender in Heritage Russian, comparing children growing up in Germany, Israel, Norway, Latvia, and the United Kingdom. The children grow up in diverse heritage language backgrounds, ranging from small groups (in Norway) to large communities (in Latvia). Furthermore, the children vary with respect to family background (one or two Russian-speaking parents) as well as the intensity of instruction in the heritage language through complementary schools. Russian has a three-gender system (masculine, feminine, and neuter) with gender cues varying in their transparency, predictability and frequency. The majority languages that these children speak differ widely with respect to the linguistic property studied: While English has no grammatical gender, Latvian and Hebrew both have twogender systems (feminine and masculine), as well as the Oslo and Tromsø dialects of Norwegian (masculine and neuter), while German has a three-gender system, with a feminine-masculine-neuter distinction, like Russian. However, the transparency of gender assignment varies greatly, with Hebrew and Latvian having predictable gender based on the shape of the noun, like Russian, while gender assignment in Norwegian is generally arbitrary and German is semi-transparent, with gender assignment tendencies rather than rules. The focus in the paper is on language-internal and language-external factors that may be (non-)facilitative for the acquisition of gender in Russian, i.e., possible cross-linguistic influence from the majority language and the importance of background factors, such as family situation, age at start of kindergarten, size of the Russian-speaking community, current exposure to Heritage Russian instruction, and the main language of instruction. Our results show no significant differences across groups with respect to the majority language, but clear effects of background variables, with family type, age, and current exposure to Heritage Russian instruction as the most important ones.

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The impact of internal and external factors on linguistic performance in the home language and in L2 among Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children

Cited by 123 publications

References 14 publications

Input Dominance and Development of Home Language in Russian-German Bilinguals

Input Dominance and Development of Home Language in Russian-German Bilinguals

Case marking and word order in Greek heritage children

Internal and External Factors in Heritage Language Acquisition: Evidence From Heritage Russian in Israel, Germany, Norway, Latvia and the United Kingdom

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