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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 11:2 (2021) ► pp.222–258

Restructuring in heritage grammars

Adjective-noun and numeral-noun expressions in Israeli Russian

ORCID logo | Bar-Ilan University
| University of Maryland, College Park

This study investigates restructuring in heritage language (HL) grammars with a special focus on the driving forces behind changes in the underlying grammar. We evaluate the effect of Age of Onset of bilingualism (AoO) on possible grammatical restructuring. Relatedly, we assess whether HL grammar divergence from the baseline can be attributed to the Age of Acquisition of a particular linguistic phenomenon and/or to the structural properties of the dominant language, under transfer.

With these general questions in mind, we conducted an auditory acceptability judgement task evaluating sensitivity to form (mis)matches in adjective-noun and numeral-noun expressions in adult Russian-Hebrew speakers: HL-speakers with AoO before age 5, HL-speakers with AoO between 5–13, and the Russian-dominant bilinguals.

The results demonstrate a robust effect of AoO: HL speakers with earlier AoO are less accurate in detecting ungrammaticalities across the board. We argue that similarities in the structures in the heritage and dominant language allow HL speakers to maintain properties of monolingual grammars; dissimilarities, on the other hand, may lead to reanalysis in the HL grammar. However, the newly-built representations in the HL do not match those of the dominant language, suggesting that changed representations do not result from direct transfer.

Keywords: heritage language, Russian, Hebrew, representational economy, adjective-noun expressions, numeral-noun expressions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1HL grammars, input, and AoO
    • 1.2Similarities in the bilingual dyad
  • 2.Motivation for the current study
  • 3.Contrastive features of Russian and Hebrew
    • 3.1Background on Russian
      • 3.1.1Adjective-noun expressions
      • 3.1.2Numeral-noun expressions
    • 3.2Background on Hebrew
      • 3.2.1Adjective-noun expressions
      • 3.2.2Numeral-noun expressions
    • 3.3Summary: Similarities and differences in adjective-noun and numeral-noun expressions in Russian and in Hebrew
  • 4.Acquisition of Russian adjective-noun and numeral-noun expressions
    • 4.1Acquisition of adjective-noun expressions
    • 4.2Acquisition of numeral-noun expressions
  • 5.Research questions and predictions of the current study
  • 6.Methodology
    • 6.1Participants
    • 6.2Materials
    • 6.3Procedure
    • 6.4Analysis
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Descriptive statistics
  • 8.Discussion
    • 8.1HL grammar and the Age of the Onset (AoO) of bilingualism
    • 8.2Mechanisms of HL grammar formation
  • 9.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18069.mei
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