Kurt Braunmüller & Christoph Gabriel (eds.): Multilingual individuals and multilingual societies.

Multilingualism is a fundamental characteristic of modern society. As highlighted by the editors of the volume, Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel, in contemporary reality multilingualism is far more prevalent than monolingualism on a global scale represented by a variety of phenomena like diglossia, plurilingualism or receptive bilingualism. Multilingualism has been studied by linguists, psychologists, educational professionals, and social scientists, all of whom have endeavored to generate the state-of-the-art scientific understanding that may disclose potential and challenges that multilingualism poses for the individual in the context of her family, school, other institutions, and society in general. Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies is the thirteenth book volume published in the series Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism. The present book volume provides a multidimensional perspective on contemporary research in multilingualism with a special focus on individual and societal aspects of this phenomenon. The volume consists of 25 contributions organized into three thematic blocks: (1) the acquisition of multilingualism, (2) historical aspects of multilingualism and variance, and (3) multilingual communication. Each block addresses a variety of issues as they relate to language acquisition, language change and language use in multilingual settings

What do asymmetries in children’s performance tell us about the nature of their underlying knowledge?

This paper examines the course of acquisition of the semantic gender criterion by studying children’s overregularization rates with two subtypes of Russian nouns: male kinship terms and male names in –a. Twenty-five Russian children aged 2;6-4;0 participated in this empirical study. The asymmetry found in their agreement production for the individual male kinship terms is explained along the lines of the Words and Rules model (Pinker 1999). That is, the asymmetry between the high- and low-frequency nouns is attributed to input frequencies. Yet, frequency is not the only factor which is responsible for the asymmetries children’s production. In addition, the differences in the semantic representation of proper names vs. common nouns may be another factor that plays a role

Grammatical Gender and Declension Class in Language Change: A Study of the Loss of Feminine Gender in Norwegian

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected

Sensitivity to microvariation in bilingual acquisition: Morphophonological gender cues in Russian heritage language

Previous research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that this property is acquired early in transparent gender systems such as Russian. However, it is not clear to what extent children are sensitive to the assignment cues and to what extent they simply memorize correspondences between frequent lexical items. Furthermore, we do not know if bilingual children are different from monolingual children in this respect. This article reports on a study investigating bilingual children’s sensitivity to gender assignment cues in Russian. A group of 64 bilingual German–Russian children living in Germany participated in the study, as well as 107 monolingual controls in Russia. The elicitation experiments used both real and nonce words, as well as noun phrases with mismatched cues (where the morphophonological shape of the noun cued one gender and the agreement on the modifying adjective another). The results show that both bilinguals and monolinguals are highly sensitive to cues, both to the frequent transparent cues and to more fine-grained gender regularities in situations where there is ambiguity. There is also an age effect, showing that younger children pay more attention to the cue on the noun itself, thus displaying a preference for regular patterns, while older children are more sensitive to gender agreement on other targets

Hvor mange genus er det i Tromsødialekten?

Tradisjonelt har tromsø-dialekten tre genus; maskulinum, femininum og nøytrum. i denne artikkelen presenterer vi resultater fra to eksperimentelle studier som kan tyde på at femininum er i ferd med å forsvinne, slik at dialekten endrer seg til et to-genussystem med felleskjønn og intetkjønn. Mens voksne bruker den ubestemte artikkelen ei så å si alltid ved femininumsord, brukes den bare litt over halvparten av tiden av tenåringer og nesten aldri av barn. i stedet overgeneraliseres maskulinumsformen (for eksempel en bok ). Det skjer imidler tid ingen endring i bestemthetssuffikset, i og med at endelsen - a i bestemt form beholdes ( boka ). en slik utvikling har også vært påvist for oslodialekten (lødrup 2011) og for språkkontakt- dialekter i nord-norge (Conzett, Johansen & sollid 2011). Denne endringen er sannsynligvis forårsaket av sosiolingvistiske faktorer, men vi argumenterer for at måten endringen skjer på, kan forklares ved hjelp av språktilegnelseENGLISH SUMMARY: Based on data from two experimental studies, this paper investigates the production of gender in a norwegian dialect (tromsø) by several groups of child and adult speakers. the findings show that gender is acquired relatively late (around age 7) and furthermore, that there are considerable differences between the groups, indicating an ongoing historical change that involves the loss of feminine gender agreement. However, the feminine declensional endings, such as the definiteness suffix, areretained. a similar development has been observed in the oslo dialect (lødrup 2011) and in certain dialects in northern norway, Kåfjord and nordreisa (Conzett, Johansen & sollid 2011). While there are presumably sociolinguistic factors causing this change, we argue that the nature of the change can be explained by the process of language acquisition.publishedVersio

Russian heritage language development in narrative contexts: Evidence from pre- and primary-school children in Norway, Germany, and the UK

The present study aims at obtaining a comprehensive picture of language development in Russian heritage language (RHL) by bringing together evidence from previous investigations focusing on morphosyntax and global accent as well as from a newly conducted analysis of a less-studied domain–lexical development. Our investigation is based on a narrative sample of 143 pre- and primary-school bilinguals acquiring RHL in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We performed a multiple-way analysis of lexical production in RHL across the different national contexts, across both languages (heritage and societal), also comparing bilinguals and monolinguals. The results revealed a clear and steady increase with age in narrative length and lexical diversity for all bilingual groups in both of their languages. The variation in lexical productivity as well as the differences between the bilingual groups and between bilinguals and monolinguals were attributed to input factors with language exposure in the home and age of starting preschool as the major predictors. We conclude that, overall, the results from lexical, grammatical, and phonological acquisition in RHL support the view that having longer exclusive or uninterrupted exposure to a heritage language in early childhood is beneficial for its development across domains

Documenting heritage language experience using questionnaires

Introduction: There exists a great degree of variability in the documentation of multilingual experience across different instruments. The present paper contributes to the “methods turn” and individual differences focus in (heritage) bilingualism by proposing a comprehensive online questionnaire building on existing questionnaires and the experience of using them to document heritage bilingualism: the Heritage Language Experience (HeLEx) online questionnaire. HeLEx is validated against and contrasted to an extended version of the Language and Social Background Questionnaire designed for heritage speakers (HSs), LSBQ-H. Methods: We compare data elicited with both questionnaires in turn from a group of Turkish HSs (n = 174, mean age=32). Our validation focuses on traditional language background variables, including language exposure and use, language proficiency, language dominance, as well as a more novel measure of language entropy. The analyses are based on a subset of key questions from each questionnaire that capture language experience for up to five languages, four modalities, and five social contexts. In a subsequent set of analyses, we explore the impact of different types of response scales, response mechanisms, and manners of variable derivation on the informativity of the data they can provide, in terms of the scope, granularity and distributional properties of the derived measures. Results and Discussion: Our results show that both HeLEx and LSBQ-H are successful at detecting the important distributional patterns in the data and reveal a number of advantages of HeLEx. In the discussion, we consider the impact of methodological choices regarding question phrasing, visual format, response options, and response mechanisms. We emphasize that these choices are not trivial and can affect the derived measures and subsequent analyses on the impact of individual differences on language acquisition and processing

Individual language experience determinants of morphosyntactic variation in heritage and attriting speakers of Bosnian and Serbian

Using a causal inference approach, we explored the relationships among the language experience determinants of morphosyntactic sensitivity, to identify the factors that indirectly and directly cause its acquisition or maintenance in immigration contexts. We probed the sensitivity to Serbian/ Bosnian clitic placement violations with a self-paced listening task, in a diverse group of bilinguals in Norway (n=71), born to immigrant parents, or having emigrated in childhood or adulthood. The outcomes included a metalinguistic violation detection score and a listening/processing time difference between licit and illicit structures. Structural Equation Models revealed that literacy (as reading practices) was among the most influential determinants of the ability to detect violations, while Bosnian/Serbian use across contexts and age of bilingualism onset determined violation sensitivity in processing. We identified a significant threshold of societal language (SL) exposure at age 8. Rather than SL exposure before this age precluding bilinguals from developing and maintaining morphosyntactic sensitivity, this threshold seems to reflect a protective effect against attrition which intensifies the later after age 8 SL exposure starts. The length of residence in Norway did not determine attrition, suggesting that heritage and attrited speakers should be considered on a continuum rather than as distinct bilingualism profiles

How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian

Peer reviewe

Crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition across linguistic modules

In this study, we investigated crosslinguistic influence (CLI) at developmental stages of third language (L3) acquisition of English by Russian–Norwegian children (N = 31). We tested seven linguistic properties within three linguistic modules (morphology, syntax and syntax-semantics). We compared the L3 learners to Norwegian (N = 90) and Russian (N = 74) second language (L2) learners of English. We predicted simultaneous facilitative and non-facilitative CLI in the L3 group within all modules, as the previously acquired languages offered conflicting options. Our predictions were partly supported. On one property, the L3 learners were different from both L2 groups, which is in line with cumulative CLI from both previously acquired languages. On four conditions, the L3 learners performed like the more accurate L2 group, indicating facilitative influence. On two conditions, all groups performed alike, showing high rates of accuracy. Taken together, the results indicate that CLI obtains on a property-by-property basis, with none of the L1s being the sole or primary source of CLI. Finally, we found CLI in all linguistic domains, but the developmental slopes for the properties were not equal, which suggests that factors such as complexity and saliency needs to be taken into account when we compare CLI