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

23.4.2026, 17:00-18:30 [zoom]

Victoriya Trubnikova (Verona): Prefixed Verbs and Morphological Awareness in Heritage Russian: Evidence from Bilingual Children in Italy

The present study contributes to the research on Russian as a Heritage Language (HL) in the Italian context. While error analysis of heritage speakers’ production (Perotto 2019) informs acquisition studies by highlighting deviations from the standard, recent research promotes a view of heritage language as a specific language variety (Rakhilina et al. 2016; Kisselev et al. 2024; Kopotev et al. 2024). This approach restores agency to non balanced bilinguals by focusing on the metalinguistic knowledge and compensation strategies that HL speakers activate when producing non-standard linguistic forms.This case study aims to provide evidence on morphological awareness of prefixed verbs in Russian language. Our research focuses on inchoative (pet’ 'sing' / za-pet’ 'begin to sing') and delimitative (pet’ 'sing' / po-pet’ 'sing for a little while') perfectives of atelic verbs. According to our hypothesis, the choice of prefix is challenging both for non-native and HL speakers due to 1) the process of perfectivization in verbs denoting activities; 2) the interplay between aspectual morphology and contextually driven semantics; 3) optionality of prefix use, which leads to the employment of lexical strategies.We examine both production and comprehension skills of bilingual children residing in Italy with regard to the use of prefixed verbs expressing activities bounded in time. Based on existing research on aspect acquisition, we expect a reduced use of complex perfectives in production, however, it is yet to be determined whether children will encounter difficulties in interpretation.To test our hypothesis, we recruited 40 bilingual children aged 7-13 with Italian as their dominant language, enrolled in three private Russian language maintenance schools. First, in a pilot study between April and May 2025, we collected elicited narratives based on cartoon clips that the participants and control group saw prior to recording. In the corpus of 10 audio registrations we observed an absence of inchoatives and delimitatives if compared to native speaker data. Second, we performed an Acceptability Judgement Task with target prefixed verbs in grammatical and non grammatical phrases while expanding our production dataset. The data collection was concluded in November 2025. The triangulation of production and comprehension results will allow us to assess the operationalization of metalinguistic knowledge (Elder et al. 1999).The findings of this research will contribute to a better understanding on the acquisitional path of HL speakers of Russian, informing course designers and language teachers about the potential for morphological creativity.