In Brazil, the learning of a second language (L2) by native Brazilian Portuguese speakers has been extensively explored, but studies on language processing and language interaction among bilinguals are quite recent. The late bilingualism of the first-generation immigrants has been studied mainly from the perspective of their difficulties in learning Brazilian Portuguese. Brazil has numerous communities of heritage speakers of many languages such as Japanese, German, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. However, the number of studies that focus on the bilingual speech of heritage speakers in Brazil is also quite limited. The aim of the current study is to evaluate the working memory in Russian-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals as a function of the language and type of bilingualism. For this purpose, 49 first-generation Russophone immigrants and 28 older Russian heritage speakers, all residing in Brazil, were tested in Russian and Portuguese using a Month-Ordering task. We found that the working memory scores of the first-generation Russophone immigrants were not statistically different between both languages, but the median working memory score of the older Russian heritage speakers in Russian was 1.5-fold lower than in Portuguese. As next steps, we plan to verify the relation between the working memory capacity and narrative production abilities of the older Russian heritage-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals in their heritage and societal languages.
Heritage speakers represent a special category of bilinguals who are exposed to their first language at home in the childhood, but later acquire the main language of their society that becomes dominant. Brazil has numerous communities of heritage speakers of many languages such as Japanese, German, Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian; however, only few speech corpora are being collected. In the current work, we describe the protocol of the data collection and discuss some points about data management for the BraPoRus (Brazilian Portuguese-Russian) corpus, a spoken corpus of heritage Russian in Brazil. The participants are 26 elderly speakers who were born in Brazil or came to Brazil as children in the 1950s. The protocol of the data collection includes: 1) a brief sociodemographic questionnaire; 2) a working memory test in Russian and Brazilian Portuguese using the Month-Ordering task; 3) a semi-spontaneous narrative about the history of the participants’ family and their immigration to Brazil; 4) the Bilingual Language Profile; 5) a sociolinguistic interview with 139 questions; 6) unscripted dialogues between participants in Russian; 7) intonation task; and 8) reading task. The BraPoRus corpus contains more than 160 hours of speech recordings and represents a unique collection of heritage Russian in Brazil. We expect that the protocol described in this work will be useful both for Brazilian linguists who study other heritage languages, and for research on heritage Russian in other countries.
The Bolshevik revolution in 1917, followed by the Civil War, induced a big wave of emigration from the ex-Russian Empire. These emigrants created their “Russia Abroad”. Many Russians stayed in Europe or China, but, in the 1940s and 1950s, many of them went to the USA, Latin America and other destinations. The importance of preserving the memories and documents of the old waves of the Russian emigration is crucial. Our group is collecting a corpus of heritage Russian in Brazil, the BRAzilian POrtuguese RUSsian Corpus (BraPoRus). While the history of Russian immigration in Brazil is to some extent studied, their remarkably preserved Russian has not been described. Our current aim is to describe the BraPoRus, a corpus that consists of multiple speech samples of older Russian heritage speakers in Brazil, and to discuss the best ways to make these data available in the forms that satisfy the requirements both for the linguistic and sociological research.
Discourse Diversity Database (3D) is a corpus designed for clinical linguistics research. It consists of oral speech samples of three different genres: picture-elicited narratives, personal stories, and picture-based instructions. The sub-sections of 3D include recordings by Russian speakers from three independent groups: people with brain tumors before and after tumor removal, people with schizophrenia, and neurologically healthy individuals. This article is devoted to the description of the data collection, the annotation scheme, and the specific characteristics of each sub-section of the corpus.
RESUMO O Discourse Diversity Database (3D) é um corpus desenvolvido para a pesquisa em linguística clínica. Ele consiste de amostras de fala oral de três gêneros diferentes: narrativas induzidas por imagens, histórias pessoais e instruções baseadas em imagens. As subdivisões do 3D incluem gravações de falantes de russo de três grupos independentes: pessoas com tumores cerebrais antes e depois da remoção do tumor, pessoas com esquizofrenia e indivíduos neurologicamente saudáveis. O presente artigo é dedicado à descrição do procedimento de coleta de dados, do esquema de anotação e das características específicas de cada subdivisão do corpus.
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