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R.C. Kellogg 1 Gender Under Incomplete Acquisition: Heritage Speakers’ Knowledge of Noun Categorization by Maria Polinsky Background: Heritage speakers (and their characteristic incomplete acquisition of the L1) are crucial to the understanding of general language acquisition, yet it is only in the past ten years or so that this group has been studied in any type of detail. It is especially key to focus on the changes these heritage speakers have in the structural, grammatical areas where the heritage speakers differ from the baseline (i.e., native speakers). Primary focus of study: Russian heritage speakers who are now dominant in American English. Lower-proficiency Russian speakers were purposely chosen in order to more clearly delineate the line between heritage speakers and bilinguals. Noun categorization (gender) chosen as focus because it brings together several areas (morphology, phonology, syntax, lexical access, sentence processing). Russian especially intriguing here, as there is interaction between the (inherent) gender of the noun and its (changeable) case. - General Principles about gender of Russian nouns o Three cases: Masculine (46% of lexican); Feminine (41%) and Neuter (13%). o Grammatical gender tends to correlate with semantic gender, but there are many exceptions. o Six cases, with four declensional classes: Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive Instrumental Prepositional Class I ‘city’ gorod gorod gorodu goroda gordom gorode Class II ‘water’ voda vodu vode vody vodoj vode Class III ‘mud’ grjaz´ grjaz´ grjazi grjazi grjaz'ju grjazi Class IV ‘milk’ moloko moloko moloku moloka molokom moloke R.C. Kellogg 2 o Gender affects many arenas (adjectives, participles, pronouns, past-tense verbs, etc) Masculine Feminine Neuter Plural (neutralized form) Past Tense Verb Adjective Possessive Pronoun pada- 'fall down' star- 'old' padal-Ø padal-a padal-o padal-i star-yi star-aja star-oje star-yje tvo-'your(s)' (2 sg.poss) tvo-j tvo-ja tvo-jo tvo-i o Stress patterns affect pronunciation, causing unstressed neuter endings to behave phonologically identically to feminine: Masculine: glavnyj [glávnyi] Feminine: glavnaja [glávnəjə] Neuter: glavnoje [glávnəjə] Gender in Uninterrupted Acquisition: - Gender assignment mostly correct by 2;5- 2;7. o Caveat: hard to pinpoint exactly from observational data The three-gender system is present from the earliest stages of acquisition Most cases sorted out before 3;0, but complete grasp comes before 4;0 Main problems after 3;0: Gender in Adult Language Re-analyzed as Masculine, ending in a vowel [e.g.: papa, ‘daddy’] Feminine, ending in a palatalized consonant [e.g.: myš', ‘mouse’] Feminine Age until which Pattern is Observed 3;0 Masculine 7;9 Neuter, stem-stressed [e.g. čudo, ‘miracle] Neuter, stem-stressed Feminine [final vowel 6;0 retained] Masculine [final vowel deleted] 6;6 The question, then, is whether heritage speakers make these same mistakes (indicating a simple halt to the L1 acquisition process), or they make their own unique mistakes. R.C. Kellogg 3 o This question becomes especially pertinent for those now dominant in English, which lacks the declensional system which reveals case. Russian heritage speakers do not completely forget about gender, but it is radically reanalyzed: Mašina car.FEM byl bol´šoe. was.MASC big.NEUT 'The car was big.' THE EXPERIMENTS: Experiment design extremely important in a case such as this one, as the possibility of mere production problems needs to be eliminated, especially seeing as the heritage speakers seem to have a minimal amount of difficulty with comprehension. Experiment One: - - Subjects: 12 English-dominant Russian heritage speakers; average age of 27; 9 born in USA and other 3 moved there between 3-5 years old; all switched to English after school. Methodology: subjects were told to say an unambiguous adjective after having a noun spoken to them. o Nouns: 122 total; average length 5.5 phonemes; 45 masculine; 43 feminine (8 ending in palatalized consonant); 34 neuter (15 ending-stressed). Results: o One speaker gave every adjective as neuter; some gave multiple answers, all of which were counted. o Subjects performed nearly perfectly with certain noun classes (masculine ending in a consonant, feminine ending in a vowel). o Other cases were much more problematic (feminine ending in palatalized consonant, (stem-stressed) neuters). Also hard for uninterrupted acquisition o Speech rate correlated with treatment of neuter nouns (slower speech neuter treated as feminine; faster speakers maintained neuter class) and with general proficiency Heritage speakers fall into two broad classes: 1. More proficient: R.C. Kellogg 4 a. Nouns ending in consonant = masculine b. Nouns ending in stressed –o = neuter c. Everything else = feminine 2. Less proficient: a. Nouns ending in consonant = masculine b. Nouns ending in vowel = feminine Overall, heritage speakers seem to be similar to non-interrupted child learners. However: no heritage speaker treated neuters as consonant-final masculines; no typical Russian-learning children ever have a two-gender system. Experiment Two: - Designed to eliminate issues of production from comprehension by focusing on the latter Stimuli: 45 nouns (15 of each gender; average length of 6.2 phonemes), which were shown three times with an unambiguous adjective, one correct time and two not. Gender matching condition masculine (dostatok ‘wealth’) bol´šoj dostatok feminine (krapiva ‘nettles’) neuter (doloto ‘chisel’) bol´šaja krapiva bol´šoje doloto - Incongruous condition bol´š- ‘big’ bol´šaja dostatok, bol´šoje dostatok bol´šoj krapiva, bol´šoje krapiva bol´šoj doloto, bol´šaja doloto Subjects were asked to press a button when they heard a correct noun-adjective pairing Results: R.C. Kellogg 5 o Confirms that the heritage speakers have problems with gender: masculine almost perfect; feminine passable; neuter hit-or-miss. Neuter marked as feminine almost 60% percent of the time, reaffirming that some heritage speakers consistently treat neuter as feminine The less-proficient group marked neuter as feminine almost 80% Conclusions: BOTTOM LINE FROM BOTH STUDIES: heritage speakers can be placed into a two-gender group and a three-gender group (which still marks some neuters as feminine). Essentially, heritage speakers analyze gender much differently than the baseline. Consequences: - Gender could disappear entirely (as in creoles—closely related to heritage language); but gender is still strongly represent in American Russian, even if analyzed differently. Shows that heritage speakers work differently than those who learn the L1 in an uninterrupted manner. There are still many individual variations to account for. Research needs to—or at least, should—examine the effects of Russian heritage speakers who are now dominant in a language that, unlike English, does contain gender (either two, like French, or three, like German).