PhD project

On the 1st of September 2011 I started working on my PhD project at the ACLC. The name of my project is: 'Typological constraints for the acquisition of gender and case. A cross-linguistic comparison of monolingual and bilingual acquisition of gender and case in Polish and Russian.'

My project is theoretical, empirical, experimental and contrastive and aims at determining the influence of minimally differentiated pairs of linguistic features and constraints on proficiency and acquisition speed of gender and case in preschool monolingual and bilingual children. The project involves two Slavic languages, Russian and Polish that form an ideal combination due to their morphological similarity and nearly identical case and gender marking, but differ from each other in reduction of unstressed vowels and fixed stress position in the word.

I will assess both comprehension and production of gender and case. The first hypothesis is that there is no difference in proficiency between Polish and Russian monolinguals when acquiring the core of the gender and case category. Language-specific phonetic and prosodic constraints could, however, influence language proficiency of bilingual children. The second hypothesis is that the acquisition order for case and gender is different for monolingual children and bilingual children. Monolingual acquisition of case precedes the acquisition of gender, while in bilingual acquisition the gender marking will be learned first. The findings will be important for typological studies, theories of learnability, second language acquisition and second language pedagogy.

  I will set up experiments in order to be able to answer the hypotheses and research questions. The experiments will consist of a combination of production tests and comprehension tests.

  I will be supervised by Prof. dr. A.E. Baker, and co-supervised by Prof. dr. W.J.J Honselaar and dr. A.V. Peeters-Podgaevskaja.   

Research interests

• (child) bilingualism
• second language acquisition
• comprehension strategies
• Slavic case and gender cues

Presentations

Frequency effects on the acquisition of Polish and Russian gender morphology
Polish children have been claimed to be faster in acquiring gender morphology than Russian children, e.g. Smoczyńska (1985). The Polish gender system appears to be more transparent since gender endings are not phonetically reduced, and the stress is always on the penultimate syllable. In Russian, however, the gender system is less transparent. Although nouns with final-stress are transparent for gender, root-stressed are not. Feminine and neuter root-stressed nouns including feminine and neuter (diminutive) nouns sound identical due to vowel reduction. The difference between Russian and Polish seems to be obvious but we do not yet know how frequent the less transparent forms are in Russian, specifically in Child Directed Speech. Frequency might affect the transparency in Russian and thus the speed of acquisition. Therefore, frequency counts in Russian CDS were carriedout on the databases from Protassova & Voeikova (2007), Bar-Shalom & Snyder (1997, 1998), and for Polish CDS on the database from Haman et al. (2011). Russian CDS frequencies were also compared with spoken adult Russian (Russian National Corpus).
The most important findings are: 1) the percentages of final-stressed nouns and root-stressed nouns in Russian CDS and adult speech are nearly identical (12-13% final-stress, 87-88% root-stress) and equally divided over gender, meaning that CDS does not add to or detract from the transparency of the system; 2) final-stressed feminine and neuter endings in Russian are very rare, leaving them as not transparent for gender; 3) diminutives are frequent in Russian CDS. This high frequency of diminutives in Russian probably leads to an even greater lack of transparency of the gender system. Further research has to show what the impact of frequency is together with the influences of stress and vowel reduction in Russian acquisition of gender compared to Polish.

• Poster 'Frequency effects'

Publications

Стратегии понимания простого предложения русскоязычными и русско-нидерландскими детьми в возрасте 6-9 лет
Summary in English will follow.

• No ancillary activities