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Processing of contrastiveness by heritage Russian bilinguals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2011

IRINA A. SEKERINA  and
JOHN C. TRUESWELL
IRINA A. SEKERINA*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, College of Staten Island, and Program in Linguistics, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
JOHN C. TRUESWELL
Affiliation:
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
*
Address for correspondence: Irina Sekerina, Department of Psychology, 4S-108, College of Staten Island, 2800 Victory Boulevard, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA. Irina.Sekerina@csi.cuny.edu
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Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian–English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective–noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju položite zvezdočku . . . “Red put star . . .” whose inherent contrastiveness results from integration of multiple sources of information, i.e., word order, prosody and visual context. The results showed that while monolinguals rapidly used word order and visual context (but not contrastive prosody) to compute the contrast set even before the noun appeared in speech, heritage Russian bilinguals were very slow and took notice of multiple sources of information only when the lexical identity of the noun made the task superfluous. These results are similar to slowed processing reported in the literature for L2 learners. It is hypothesized that this slowdown in HL processing is due to cascading effects of covert competition between the two languages that starts at the level of spoken word recognition and culminates at the interfaces and, with time, it may become a major contributing force to heritage language attrition.

Keywords

Russianheritage languageeye-trackingcontrastiveness
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 280 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under ADVANCE Grant #0137851 and the PSC-CUNY 35 and 38 grants (#66683-00-35, #696053-00-38) to the first author. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. The authors also thank Yana Pugach and Marina Shechtman for their assistance with the eye-movement analyses and Alexandr E. Kibrik, Olga V. Fedorova and Andrey A. Kibrik (Program in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Philological Department, Moscow State University) for making Experiment 1 possible. Special thanks go to all the third-year OTiPL students (winter 2003) and CSI bilingual undergraduate students who enthusiastically participated in the experiments.

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