The narrative skills of Russian-Cypriot Greek children

Abstract

This study investigates the narrative skills of Russian-Cypriot Greek bilingual children, with a focus on macro- and micro-structure, grammaticality, and disfluencies. The results show a correlation between the rates of macro- and micro-structure measures, grammaticality, and disfluencies in the heritage language, Russian. Mode of narration, age, and language proficiency affect the narrative production. The most prominent disfluency types are repetitions, filled pauses, and lexical and grammatical revisions, which can be due to the activation of both languages and cross-linguistic interference. The grammaticality analysis revealed that the most vulnerable domain for bilingual children was in the functional categories. This research provides further evidence to Russian heritage language research for early-stage language development, with a new societal majority language, Cypriot Greek.