Relative Clauses in Heritage Russian: Fossilization or Divergent Grammar?

Abstract

This paper has two related goals. First, it explores the knowledge of relative clauses in several groups of Russian speakers, children and adults, thus adding new results to the growing body of literature on the processing of relative clauses across languages and populations of speakers. Second, it uses the results from a relative clause study to address the issue of linguistic knowledge in the poorly understood population known as heritage speakers. Heritage speakers are early sequential bilinguals whose first language is a minority language of the society in which they grow up; they learn this language before they acquire the majority language, but the latter then becomes their dominant language. According to a widely accepted definition proposed by Guadelupe Valdes, a heritage speaker of language L is someone who grew up hearing and possibly speaking L in

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.