Multilingual Acquisition and Processing: Heritage Russian in Spain

Recent research highlights a need of deeper understanding of the nature of language competence and the development of this competence under heritage language bi- and multilingualism. Heritage speakers (HSs) is a population highly diverse in terms of their linguistic competence and its development.

Multilingual Acquisition and Processing (MAP): Heritage Russian in Spain will provide an examination of Russian Heritage Language (HL) grammar in a previously unstudied socio-linguistic context focusing in particular on the patterns of cross-linguistic interaction at early and most unstable stages of multilingual language development.

The overall research objective is to discover the patterns of language acquisition and language processing in order to find out how multilingual minds deploy their developing grammatical knowledge and how they detect and access the linguistic (morpho-syntactic) mechanisms from their two co-existing languages in real-time.

The proposed empirical study will investigate the effects of linguistic proximity, individual experiential factors and the developmental patterns of cross-linguistic influence in child bilingualism.

Heritage Russian in Spain will be studied with a focus on 3-7-year-old children in order to examine developmental trajectories in both languages.

On the theoretical level, MAP will significantly contribute to the development of a model of heritage language grammar and add to a sub-field of multilingualism studies, Heritage Language Acquisition, by showing the patterns of cross-linguistic interaction at early stages of multilingual Russian-Spanish development.

On a societal and education level, project findings will be relevant for policy makers, teachers, school principals and HSs communities in European countries.

To date, most heritage language studies have focused exclusively on the minority language, MAP will fill an important gap by focusing on both languages.