24.1082, Diss: Lang Acq/English/Russian: Mikhaylova: '(In)complete Acquisition of Aspect in Second Language and Heritage Russian'

[linguist at linguistlist.org]

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-1082. Sun Mar 03 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.1082, Diss: Lang Acq/English/Russian: Mikhaylova: '(In)complete Acquisition of Aspect in Second Language and Heritage Russian'

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Veronika Drake, U of Wisconsin Madison
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
       <reviews at linguistlist.org>

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Do you want to donate to LINGUIST without spending an extra penny? Bookmark
the Amazon link for your country below; then use it whenever you buy from
Amazon!

USA: http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-20
Britain: http://www.amazon.co.uk/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-21
Germany: http://www.amazon.de/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistd-21
Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-22
Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistc-20
France: http://www.amazon.fr/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistf-21

For more information on the LINGUIST Amazon store please visit our
FAQ at http://linguistlist.org/amazon-faq.cfm.

Editor for this issue: Lili Xia <lxia at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  


Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:55:30
From: Anna Mikhaylova [mikhaylo at uoregon.edu]
Subject: (In)complete Acquisition of Aspect in Second Language and Heritage Russian

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=24-1082.html&submissionid=8966237&topicid=14&msgnumber=1
 
Institution: University of South Carolina 
Program: Linguistics Program 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Anna Mikhaylova

Dissertation Title: (In)complete Acquisition of Aspect in Second Language and
Heritage Russian 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Russian (rus)


Dissertation Director(s):
Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva
Stanley Dubinsky

Dissertation Abstract:

Russian Aspect is known to be problematic both for monolingual and 
bilingual children acquiring Russian and adults acquiring Russian as 
second/foreign language (Kazanina & Philips 2007, Anstatt 2008, 
Gupol 2009, Slabakova 2005, Nossalik 2009). Recent studies have 
also shown that aspect may not be completely acquired by Russian 
heritage speakers (HL) of low and even near-native proficiency 
(Polinsky 2008, Laleko 2010). In my study, advanced proficiency 
English dominant HL foreign language (L2) speakers of Russian show 
an asymmetry in their comprehension of lexical and grammatical 
aspect. I show that the semantics and syntax of aspect are acquired; 
however aspectual morphology plays both a facilitative and a hindering 
role in the comprehension of aspectual distinctions. 

Two experimental tasks manipulated pairs of sentences differing in 
aspectual interpretation based on presence/absence of a telicizing 
prefix or presence/absence of an imperfectivizing suffix. The tasks 
tested the same three conditions (perfective/imperfective pairs 
contrasting in lexical aspect (activity-accomplishment pairs) and 
grammatical aspect contrasts in accomplishments and achievements). 
The tasks differed in the type of knowledge they tapped into. The 
semantic entailments (SE) task elicited most salient entailments of 
sentences that provided no aspectual information except that 
instantiated by verbal morphology. The SE task was difficult from the 
point of view of semantics, because in order to find the most logical 
interpretation of the sentence, the participants needed to imagine all 
possible interpretations of the sentence, even those potentially 
imposed by discourse. In contrast, the stop-making-sense (SMS) task 
tested the participants’ sensitivity to mismatches between a 
disambiguating adverbial and the predicate. The sentences in the SMS 
task appeared one word at a time, with no backtracking possibility, 
creating a high working memory load. 

The findings suggest that in the SE task, the morphological complexity 
of secondary imperfectives coupled with their semantic complexity, 
hinders HL interpretations. In contrast, in the SMS task the 
idiosyncratic morphology marking lexical aspect hinders HL processing, 
while the regular mechanism of marking grammatical aspect facilitates 
it. In addition, lexical aspect may be an exceptionally tight spot of the 
HL acquisition because of the mismatch between morphological means 
of marking specific lexical aspect English (object marking) and Russian 
(verb marking). The findings are consistent with Bottleneck Hypothesis 
(Slabakova 2008), which assumes functional morphology to be a tight 
spot in second language acquisition and acquisition of syntax and 
semantics to be unproblematic. I propose, following Polinsky 2011, that 
functional morphology can be seen as an acquisitional bottleneck for 
heritage language speakers as well. In addition, as Montrul 2009, I 
have found that heritage speakers have advantage over foreign 
language learners in the acquisition of grammatical aspect, but not 
necessarily of lexical aspect.






----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-24-1082	
----------------------------------------------------------