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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).