Grammatical gender agreement in production: The case of heritage Russian

Abstract

The primary goal of this study was to investigate the knowledge of Russian gender in young heritage speakers through different agreement constructions. Participants were 30 Russian–Spanish–Catalan multilinguals from Spain aged 7–11 years, divided into two proficiency groups, and a baseline group of 24 age-matched Russian monolinguals residing in Russia. All participants completed four experiments using an oral elicited production task addressing different linguistic conditions. The accuracy scores were compared between the two proficiency groups and between the heritage and monolingual speakers to document any changes as a function of the type of agreement construction, gender value, noun form transparency, and crosslinguistic congruency. The results demonstrated a hierarchy of gender values; masculine being the easiest gender value, neuter the most difficult, and feminine in between the two. The crosslinguistic influence was yelled under vulnerable conditions: when (1) the proficiency in heritage language is low, (2) in opaque and (or) incongruent nouns, and (3) in agreement construction which is absent in Spanish and Catalan. The results also suggest that the heritage language from the high-proficiency group can attain monolingual-like gender agreement knowledge. We documented gender agreement production in trilingual speakers, which is an under-explored topic. The study employs a new method of analysing gender in several constructions, including adjectival and verbal agreement at Noun Phrase and sentence levels. The study provides insights into heritage language development during the early years of exposure to the two majority languages. The results may offer a greater understanding of the characteristics of heritage language/L2 development in trilingual children.