How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian

Abstract

The present study compares narrative macrostructure, measured as Story Structure (SS) and Story Complexity (SC), in bilinguals speaking Russian as their home/heritage language (L1) and exposed to different societal languages (L2), while focusing on the effects of different L2s, bilingualism, and episodic struc-ture. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) was used to elicit narratives in L1/Russian from 162 L2 Finnish, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, or Swedish bilinguals (4and 6-year-olds) and 21 monolingual Russian children (4-year-olds). Age-matched bilinguals showed similarity in SS (except for children speaking L2 German or Hebrew) and SC. Monolinguals (age range 50-59 months) outperformed younger bilinguals (age range 48-59 months) in SS and SC but performed similarly to older bilinguals (age range 66-83 months). Fine-grained analysis revealed that a well-formed episode might include an Attempt-Outcome sequence combined with Internal States (and not only Goal-Attempt-Outcome) and that children are sensitive to events depicted in each episode. The findings show some evidence for the universality of macrostructure and provide insight into macrostructural knowledge at the episode level. The results are discussed within the theoretical model of multidimensional text organization.

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

“…In the past two decades, a large number of studies have appeared around the world reporting data from child and adult heritage speakers of Russian with different societal majority languages (English, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Latvian, Spanish, and Dutch among others). Thus, to date there is considerable knowledge about the linguistic behavior and competence in RHL at early and later stages of language development (Dieser, 2009;Polinsky, and Maria., 2008;Laleko, 2010Laleko, , 2022Schwartz et al, 2015;Brehmer and Kurbangulova, 2017;Rodina, 2017;Gagarina et al, 2021;Krüger, 2021;Meir and Janssen, 2021;Otwinowska et al, 2021;among others). The available observations come primarily from specific case studies.…”