Research in RSL inflectional morphology

[Greg Thomson]

Greetings SEELangsers. I am doing research on the acquisition of inflection
in Russian as a second language. This grew out of an interest in the
acquisition of L2 inflectional morphology in general. When I started I did
not know Russian, and thus I have been learning Russian from scratch,
starting with a background in SLA, psycholinguistics, and linguistic field
methods. This past spring I conducted an experiment with 37 non-native
speakers of Russian (and 13 native controls) aimed at detecting sensitivity
to inflectional morphology during listening comprehension. Subjects
attempted to detect errors in three conditions: Meaning-Focused Listening,
Form-Focused Listening, and a pencil and paper task. They were divided into
two groups: intermediate (17 subjects) and advanced (20) based on the
number of years they have been learning Russian. All were residents of St.
Petersburg and regular users of Russian as a second language. My assumption
was that if a subject is able to understand a sentence but cannot detect an
inflectional error, than s/he probably is not making much use of inflection
in that particular context and function. The evidence from the first
experience points to a very prolonged period of development, and seems to
suggest that even solid metalinguistic knowledge of the basic "rules" of
case and aspect (the two categories tested), often does not develop well
apart from the global development of proficiency. This may help to account
for the frustration (and often pain) experienced by non-native speakers of
Russian who are attempting to "get all the endings right" in their spoken
production from a very early stage, since they may not yet have developed
an underlying language processing system to support these efforts.

Anyway, I have written up the first experiment as a paper. If you are
actively involved in research into Russian as a second language and might
be able to give me feedback, I would be happy to mail you a copy, while
copies last. Since my background is not specifically in RSL nor even in
Russian linguistics, I'm feeling a need for feedback from people who have
worked longer in those areas, especially RSL.

Cordially,
Greg

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Greg Thomson, Ph.D. Candidate (gthomson at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca)
Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Alberta,
4-32 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E7, CANADA
Phone: 7-812-246-35-48 (Russia)