Does reading in shallow L1 orthography slow attrition of language-specific morphological structures?

Abstract

This study looks at the relationship between L1 (Russian) attrition and L1 reading ability in Russian-English-speaking bilingual children. Ten Russian-English bilingual children and 10 adults participated in this study. Nine out of 10 children participants were born in the US and used L1 as their primary language of interaction within the family, but the intensity and the length of uninterrupted L1 exposure differed for each child. All participants were tested on perception (grammaticality judgement) and production (narrative) tasks to assess their sensitivity to and retention of the morphosyntactic structure of L1. All children showed some attrition of grammatical morphemes, specifically in the Russian systems of declension and conjugation; however, the degree of attrition correlated with reading ability in L1, i.e. children with L1 reading skills showed a lesser degree of attrition for some language-specific morphosyntactic structures. This finding shows interdependence of oral and reading skills and points to the role reading in language with shallow orthography may play in preservation of L1 grammatical structures in oral language. The implications for the clinical applications are also discussed.

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

“…Although language is an oral phenomenon and writing is a cultural invention, in countries with high literacy rates, native speakers are educated, and we know that the level of education plays a role in degrees of linguistic competence in one's language (Pakulak & Neville 2010, Dąbrowska 2012. Literacy has also been related to delaying or even sparing the process of language attrition in children (Zaretsky & Bar-Shalom 2010). It is not clear to what extent written language helps fix the language in the mind of a native speaker.…”

Heritage languages: A new laboratory for empirical linguistics

“…They go on to point out that literacy in the heritage language coun teracts language attrition in children (see also Montrul 2008, Zaretsky andBar Shalom 2010). I suggest literacy and formal schooling play a much larger role in language development than most linguists are willing to admit.…”

Russian language proficiency of monolingual and Russian–English bi/multilingual children

“…Some studies also suggest that language use is an important predictor of children's language fluency (Bedore, Peña, Gillam, & Tsung-Han, 2010, Hammer et al, 2012. By contrast, a few studies seem to indicate that the frequency of language use does not predict fluency (Schmidt, 2007;Zaretsky & Bar-Shalom, 2010). Therefore, we were motivated to see whether adequate language skill development by bi/multilingual children is possible in situations where social support for the immigrant language is minimal, and the language input and use are limited, as is the case of Russian in Saskatchewan.…”

“…In an ideal world, with equal exposure to both languages, children could become balanced bilinguals (Davidson, 2009). However, the same amount of exposure to two languages is difficult to achieve in daily life; dominant bilinguals who speak one language better than the other are, therefore, more common (Paradis, Crago, Genesee, & Rice, 2003;Zaretsky & Bar-Shalom, 2010). Balance is even harder to achieve between a minority and a majority language because the heritage language has more limited resources and social support (De Houwer, 2007).…”

“…The age selected for the study was 5-6, since monolingual children of this age are known to have already formed basic Russian grammar skills (Zaretsky & Bar-Shalom, 2010), and since at this age, bi/multilingual children already started public schools, they are exposed to English, but are not yet fully assimilated into the majority language environment.…”