Acquisition of the Russian case system by monolinguals and bilinguals

The aim of the project is to study the mechanisms and stages of acquisition of the Russian case system of monolingual and bilingual children. The goal is to identify at what age monolingual and bilingual children learn to generalize rules of nominal case usage. This goal will be achieved through two psycholinguistic experiments in groups of monolingual children and bilingual children from 2 to 6 years old.

Children performed a picture-based sentence completion task with real words and pseudowords. Frames were constructed to bias the children’s responses towards the use of a noun form in one of the five oblique Russian cases, across three declensions in singular and plural forms. In the first part of the experiment, the participants named real objects with real words. The objects were drawn by an artist for presentation in isolation (to elicit naming responses) and for the presentation of situations (to elicit oblique case markings). The words denoted everyday objects and animals and were familiar to children at 2 years of age e.g., стул-∅ (chairNOM). In the second part of the experiment, the participants named nonexisting objects with pseudowords. The pictures were selected from the Novel Object and Unusual Name Database (NOUN; Horst and Hout 2016) and redrawn by the same artist who created the real objects stimuli. For constructing pseudowords we switched the consonants in the stimulus real words, e.g. смук-∅ (smukNOM). Thus, we retained the same properties for the novel words—length, phonological form, and morphological structure.

In the first part, the experimenter showed a picture of an object in isolation to the child and asked to name it. After responding, the experimenter showed the second screen, on which the same object was depicted in a situation. For instance, one picture may show a train, and the second picture will show children riding the train. The child was asked to complete the sentence “The children are riding the …” with the required form of the noun (i.e. train in the prepositional case). In the second part of the experiment, the experimenter named the object in isolation (e.g. “vomaka”) and asked the child to complete the sentence with the required form of the pseudoword using the inflection that s/he considered fit for this word. We recorded and scored the answers of the children.

We use a psycholinguistic approach to investigate whether the strategies for acquiring the Russian case system in monolingual and bilingual children are consistent with each other, and we also want to determine the quantitative and qualitative differences in the acquisition of case forms in monolingual and bilingual children.