Bibi Janssen

The present study explores the acquisition of the Russian accusative [acc] case inflections in two groups of bilingual children (Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew) who acquire Russian as their Heritage Language (HL) and two groups of monolingual Russian-speaking children within the Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2008, 2012). Seventy-two typically developing children participated in the study. Children's performance on three tasks was compared: elicited production, forced-choice comprehension and sentence repetition. The current study confirmed the predictions of the Unified Competition Model: monolingual children view the [acc] case inflection as a reliable cue. Conversely, bilingual children showed lower accuracy on nouns which require the use of a dedicated [acc] marker. Similarly, the percentage of children manifesting sensitivity to [acc] case cue was low in bilinguals. The findings of the study extend the Unified Competition Model to patterns of HL acquisition in bilinguals. Cue detection in HL for bilinguals is challenged when exposure is limited.

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from 5 language families (Afroasiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: Turkic language: Indo-european: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the order of ratings across 25 languages. Data are then analysed (1) to ascertain how demographic characteristics of participants influence AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs). All 299 words were judged as acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the rater’s social or language status, but not with the rater’s age or education. Parents reported words to be learned earlier, and bilinguals later. Estimations of  the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.

Knowing a language implies both speaking and understanding it, however, in child language for certain linguistic phenomena asymmetries in both directions have been reported between production and comprehension. This is the first study to explore the relation between production and comprehension of case endings in Russian in monolingual and bilingual children. Russian is a rich case language that realizes case features morphologically, whereas, Dutch and Hebrew have no morphological case inflections on nouns. Russian speaking monolingual children produce case inflections early on and acquire case with no difficulty (Cejtlin, 2009). Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew bilingual children lag behind monolinguals in producing (Peeters-Podgaevskaja, 2008; Meir & Armon-Lotem, to appear) and processing case endings (Janssen, Meir, Baker & Armon-Lotem, to appear).
The current study investigates production and comprehension of the accusative case and explores the relation thereof in Russian in monolingual and bilingual children with varying ages of onset (AoO) to Hebrew and Dutch. Seventy-two typically developing children participated in the study: 18 Russian-Dutch, 18 Russian-Hebrew, and 36 Russian (half age-matched, half younger). A case elicitation task was used to test accusative case production, an online sentence comprehension task was administered to test the comprehension of simple transitive sentences both in SVO and OVS with objects in the accusative case.
Anova's demonstrated that the monolinguals outperformed both bilingual groups both on production and on comprehension of accusatives in OVS (p<.001). No significant differences between the two monolingual groups nor between the two bilingual groups were detected. To test if there is an asymmetry between comprehension and production a repeated measures Anova was performed (comprehension vs. production). A significant main effect of task was found (p<.001): production got higher scores than comprehension. However a significant interaction TASK*GROUP (p<.001) was also detected. Paired t-tests showed that this was caused by an asymmetry between production and comprehension (better production than comprehension) for both monolingual groups (p<.001), but this was not observed for bilinguals: Russian-Dutch (p=.449) and Russian-Hebrew (p=.344). Furthermore, accusative case production was found to be correlated with AoO and home language policy: children with more Russian at home and later onset to the sparse case language were more successful in case production.
The results of our study demonstrate an asymmetry between production and comprehension for monolingual children only: they are at ceiling on production of accusative case inflection as early as the age of 4 whereas their comprehension  slightly lags behind. By contrast, bilingual children have profound difficulties with both case production and comprehension across the board under the influence of a sparse case language of society. 

Cejtlin, S. N. (2009). Očerki po slovoobrazovaniju i formoobrazovaniju v detskoj reči. Moskva: Znak.
Janssen, B., Meir, N., Baker, A., & Armon-Lotem, S. (to appear). On-line comprehension of Russian case cues in monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew children.
Meir, N., & Armon-Lotem, S. (to appear). Disentangling bilingualism from SLI in Heritage Russian: The impact of L2 properties and length of exposure to the L2. In C. Hamann & E. Ruigendijk (Eds.), Language Acquisition and Development: Proceedings of GALA 2013. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Peeters-Podgaevskaja, A. V. (2008). Problemy osvoenija russkogo jazyka kak vtorogo rodnogo det’mi 5-7 let i sozdanie adekvatnogo učebnogo posobija. In E. de Haard, W. Honselaar & J. Stelleman (Eds.), Literature & beyond. Festschrift for W. G. Weststeijn (pp. 609-628). Amsterdam: Pegasus.