Production, comprehension and repetition
of accusative case by monolingual Russian
and bilingual Russian-Dutch and
Russian-Hebrew-speaking children
Bibi Janssen and Natalia Meir
University of Amsterdam / Bar-Ilan University
Te present study explores the acquisition of the Russian accusative [acc] case
infections in two groups of bilingual children (Russian-Dutch and Russian-
Hebrew) who acquire Russian as their Heritage Language (HL) and two groups
of monolingual Russian-speaking children within the Unifed Competition
Model (MacWhinney, 2008, 2012). Seventy-two typically developing children
participated in the study. Children’s performance on three tasks was compared:
elicited production, forced-choice comprehension and sentence repetition.
Te current study confrmed the predictions of the Unifed Competition
Model: monolingual children view the [acc] case infection as a reliable cue.
Conversely, bilingual children showed lower accuracy on nouns which require
the use of a dedicated [acc] marker. Similarly, the percentage of children
manifesting sensitivity to [acc] case cue was low in bilinguals. Te fndings of
the study extend the Unifed Competition Model to patterns of HL acquisition
in bilinguals. Cue detection in HL for bilinguals is challenged when exposure
is limited.
Keywords: accusative case, Russian, Heritage Language, the Unifed Competition
Model
1. Introduction
Language acquisition is afected by input characteristics (for an overview see
Lieven & Tomasello, 2008). Tis is true for monolingual children (for an overview
see Gathercole & Hof, 2007) and it is even more apparent in bilingual language
development (for an overview see Armon-Lotem & Meir, 2019; De Houwer, 2007;
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17021.jan | (Published online: 10 Dec 2018)
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1–30.
issn 1879–9264 | e-issn 1879–9272 © John Benjamins Publishing Company