Contrastive focus is acquirable: An investigation of Russian contrastive focus with English/Russian bilinguals

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to...

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Veröffentlicht in:Second language research Jg. 40; H. 3; S. 709 - 737
Hauptverfasser: Ionin, Tania, Luchkina, Tatiana, Goldshtein, Maria
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: London, England SAGE Publications 01.07.2024
Sage Publications Ltd
Schlagworte:
Acceptability
Bilingual people
Bilingualism
Competence
Computation
Cues
Cultural heritage
English language
Experiments
Focus
Heritage language
Monolingualism
Prosody
Russian language
Second Language Learning
prosodic prominence
cross-linguistic influence
contextual prominence
Russian
syntax–discourse interface
second language learners
heritage speakers
contrastive focus
ISSN:0267-6583, 1477-0326
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Zusammenfassung:This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual speakers use both contextual and prosodic cues to determine the location of contrastive focus. A follow-up experiment uses two prominence detection tasks in order to separately examine participants’ sensitivity to contextual vs. prosodic cues. The findings indicate that, at higher proficiency, bilingual speakers of Russian successfully use both contextual and prosodic cues to contrastive focus; with proficiency controlled for, heritage speakers do not have an advantage over second language learners in this domain. These findings are discussed in light of cross-linguistic influence and interface vulnerability.
Bibliographie:ObjectType-Article-1
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ISSN:0267-6583
1477-0326
DOI:10.1177/02676583231178101