Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

12.06. Sergey Minor & Natalia Mitrofanova (Tromsø): Is cross-linguistic influence from the societal language into the heritage language always stronger? Grammatical case and aspect processing by German-Russian and Spanish-Russian bilinguals vs. monolingual controls  [zoom]

We investigate crosslinguistic influence (CLI) in grammatical processing by comparing Russian heritage bilinguals (ages 6–12) from two groups: Spanish-Russian (n=85) and German-Russian (n=45). These groups were carefully matched by age, exposure (Q-Bex), and lexical proficiency (MAIN narratives). Using Visual World eyetracking, we examined the processing of grammatical case and aspect—features vulnerable in heritage Russian but acquired early in monolinguals. The populations were chosen based on structural similarities: Russian and German both mark grammatical case, while Spanish does not; conversely, Spanish and Russian exhibit certain overlap in marking verbal aspect, while German does not. Testing was conducted in both the heritage and societal languages of the bilinguals (with monolinguals controls in Russian, Spanish and German), using paradigms based on Kamide et al. (2003) for case and Zhou et al. (2014) for aspect.

Results revealed significant effects of case and aspect in Russian for both bilingual groups, though these effects were smaller compared to Russian monolingual children. Interestingly, the two bilingual groups performed similarly, showing no differences in either case or aspect. While no facilitation from the societal language to the heritage language was observed, there is evidence suggesting facilitation from the heritage language to the societal language (compared to German controls for case and Spanish controls for aspect). We discuss these findings in the context of studies reporting differential CLI effects on bilingual children’s societal and heritage languages.