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The starting point of most experimental and clinical examinations of bilingual language development is the choice of the measure of participants’ proficiency, which affects the interpretation of experimental findings and has pedagogical and clinical implications. Recent work on heritage and L2 acquisition of Russian used varying proficiency assessm...
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... As a second step, the participants were exposed to a cloze deletion test (Luchkina et al. 2021), which was also administered through SoSciSurvey in a bimodal way, meaning that the participants could see the text and hear it read aloud by the tester, to assess their proficiency in Russian (see Section 2.4.2). Both the questionnaire and the cloze deletion test were completed orally by the participants in the presence of the test administrators to ensure the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data collected. ...
... In order not to be dependent on self-assessments regarding the participants' proficiency in Russian, we also administered the cloze deletion test developed by Luchkina et al. (2021) to our participants (see Appendix A). This standardized tool was designed to specifically measure the proficiency levels of bilingual and/or second language learners of Russian, which made it suitable for providing an objective measure of the proficiency in Russian of the representatives of the different generations in our selected Russianspeaking families. ...
... Figure 1 presents the results obtained from the cloze deletion test. According to the criteria employed by Luchkina et al. (2021), the scoring ranges correspond to the proficiency levels in Russian as follows: Level 4 (High) encompasses scores from 75 to 100%, while native-like accuracy is specifically indicated by scores ranging from 98 to 100%; Level 3 (Mid) spans from 45 to 74%, indicating moderate proficiency; Level 2 (Low-mid) covers the range from 20 to 44%, suggesting elementary understanding; and Level 1 (Low) includes the values from 5 to 19%, thereby denoting minimal proficiency. ...
This study investigates the influence of selected aspects of family language policies (FLPs) on language proficiency across three generations of Russian-speaking families in Germany using data from a sample of 18 families. The data were collected via questionnaires and a cloze test was used to measure proficiency in Russian. Multiple regression analysis and Dunn’s test were employed to analyze the influence of the selected components of FLP and assess differences in language proficiency between family members. The findings highlight a significant generational shift in language proficiency: parents exhibited the highest proficiency in Russian, followed by grandparents, with children showing the least proficiency and greater variation in their language skills. This pattern reflects the dynamics of language practices in families where older generations predominantly use Russian, whereas children display a greater inclination towards German or enhanced bilingualism. Additionally, this study underscores the positive influence of literacy skills in both Russian and German, reading in Russian, and a positive attitude towards maintaining cultural ties through reading on Russian language proficiency. Although attendance of Russian language lessons was positively correlated with the proficiency scores of children, the statistical models were only partially successful in accounting for their overall impact on proficiency, indicating that other unexplored factors may also play a significant role.
... However, most research on cloze-tests is conducted with adult foreign language learners, who acquired the assessed language in formal instruction settings. The validation of cloze-tests for other types of speakers, such as HL speakers, has been initiated only recently (Drackert & Timukova, 2020;Luchkina et al., 2021). Drackert & Timukova (2020) show that late L2 learners perform better than HL speakers in a cloze-test, mainly because the latter exhibit some deficits in orthographical knowledge (see also Mehlhorn, 2016). ...
... The authors suggest to take this deficit into account when scoring the test by ignoring pure orthographic errors or considering partially correct 9 answers as correct. When orthographic errors are not considered, cloze-tests turn out as reliable instruments for HL speakers' language knowledge too (see also Luchkina et al., 2021 for a similar conclusion). ...
Several studies on heritage language (HL) acquisition investigate a single linguistic structure, showing how language exposure or cross-linguistic effects affect its acquisition. Here, we consider HL speaking children's mastery of several linguistic structures using a cloze-test. We examine how their language competence is affected by language exposure variables and age. We tested 180 children between the ages of 8 and 16, living in Switzerland and speaking European Portuguese as HL and French, German or Italian as their societal language. The items of the cloze-test cluster around two levels of difficulty, with the items at the second level corresponding to structures that are acquired late in Portuguese monolingual acquisition. Older age and a greater amount of formal instruction in the HL lead to better performance. The role of the amount of formal instruction varies based on the level of difficulty of the target structures. Cross-linguistic influence does not affect the results.
... However, there are a few studies that used the cloze task, either non-normed or normed with the adult native speakers, as an approximate measure of HSs' proficiency level. These studies report higher performance accuracies of HSs on these tests compared with L2 learners (Luchkina et al. 2021) and greater predictive value of the cloze test for the assessment of the grammatical knowledge of HSs (Gor 2019). Thus, there is some initial evidence that literate HSs can generate predictions in heritage language written production. ...
Ample evidence suggests that monolingual adults can successfully generate lexical and morphosyntactic predictions in reading and that correct predictions facilitate sentence comprehension. In this eye-tracking corpus reading study, we investigate whether the same is true for reading in heritage language. Specifically, we ask whether heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian are able to anticipate lexical and/or morphosyntactic information of the upcoming words in the sentence and whether they differ in the predictions from monolingual children and L2 learners. We are also interested in whether the literacy level (i.e., Russian literacy experience or reading fluency in English) influences lexical and morphosyntactic prediction. Our results indicate that HSs as well as other groups were able to anticipate the specific lexical item, and the ability was contingent on the Russian literacy experience and reading fluency in dominant English as evident in some of the early and late eye-tracking measures. Similar to children and L2 learners, the word class and the verb number predictability affected reading times in HSs, but HSs were the only group to anticipate the number of the upcoming noun. We discuss findings in respect to the utility account of the bilingual prediction and divergent attainment trajectory of the heritage language development.
... We used a proficiency test that was developed from the cloze test in Luchkina & Stoops (2013). In the original cloze test, a 309-word Russian newspaper article had every fifth word removed and replaced with a blank, for a total of 58 blanks; a later study (Luchkina, Ionin, Lysenko, Stoops, & Suvorkina, 2021) created a multiplechoice version of the cloze test, with three response answer options per blank, only one of which is correct; the other two options are always either semantically or grammatically anomalous. 5 Both the original and the multiple-choice test versions have been validated (see Luchkina et al., 2021 for details), and the findings suggest that the multiple-choice format is a better measure of learners' proficiency than the fill-in-the-blank format: while the learners' accuracy ranges were similar across the two versions, the distribution approached normality for the multiplechoice version, compared to a largely bimodal distribution on the fill-in-the-blank version. ...
This paper reports on an experimental investigation of what second language (L2) learners and heritage speakers of Russian know about the relationship between word order and information structure in Russian. The participants completed a bimodal acceptability judgment task, rating the acceptability of SVO and OVS word orders in narrow-focus contexts, under neutral prosody. Heritage speakers behaved like the control group of baseline speakers, preferring SVO order in answer to object questions, and OVS order in answer to subject questions. In contrast, L2 learners preferred SVO order regardless of the context. While the heritage speaker group was more proficient than the L2 group, proficiency alone cannot account for differences in performance: specifically, with regard to acceptance of OVS order for subject narrow focus, heritage speakers improved with proficiency, but L2 learners did not. It is proposed that heritage speakers have an advantage in this domain due to early age of acquisition (cf. Montrul, 2008 ). This finding is consistent with prior literature on narrow focus with heritage speakers of other languages, and suggests that this phenomenon is not particularly vulnerable in heritage languages.
This study investigates the acquisition of sentence focus in Russian by adult English-Russian bilinguals, while paying special attention to the relative contribution of constituent order and prosodic expression. It aims to understand how these factors influence perceived word-level prominence and focus assignment during listening.
We present results of two listening tasks designed to examine the influence of pitch cues and constituent order on perceived word prominence (Experiment 1) and focus assignment (Experiment 2) during the auditory comprehension of SV[O]F and OV[S]F sentences in Russian. Our findings reveal an asymmetric pattern: monolingual speakers, as a baseline, tend to perceive the nuclear pitch-accented object as more prominent, particularly in the SVO order, whereas bilinguals appear to be less sensitive to the constituent order distinction.
Additionally, baseline speakers consistently assign focus to the sentence-final nuclear pitch-accented noun regardless of constituent order. In contrast, bilinguals demonstrate a preference for assigning focus to the sentence-final nuclear-accented object, rather than the sentence-final nuclear-accented subject. A proficiency effect emerged indicative of a more target-like performance among bilinguals with greater proficiency in Russian.
This volume contributes to ongoing discussions of ethics in Applied Linguistics scholarship by focusing in depth on several different sub-areas within the field. The book is comprised of four sections: methodological approaches to research; specific participant populations and contexts of research; (language) pedagogy and policy; and personal and interactive aspects of research and scholarship. Moving beyond discussions of how ethics is conceptualized or defined, the chapters in this volume explore ethics-in-practice by examining context-specific ethical challenges and offering guidance for current and future Applied Linguistics scholars. This volume responds to the need to provide context-specific research ethics training for graduate students and novice researchers interested in a variety of contexts and methodological approaches. After engaging with this volume, new and experienced applied linguists alike will gain familiarity with specific ethical challenges and practices within particular sub-disciplines relevant to their work and across the field more broadly.
Stuttering is progressively reduced when persons who stutter repeatedly read the same text. This reduction has been recently attributed to motor learning with repeated practice of speech-motor sequences. In the present study, we investigated the adaptation effect of 17 bilingual adults who stutter (BAWS). We asked these participants to complete a particular paradigm of reading passages with a 30-minute break between them. Participants were Kannada-English speaking BAWS. We split them into two groups of eight and nine participants, respectively who read in counter-balanced order two passages written in the Kannada and English languages. The averaged data from the two groups resulted in a typical adaptation curve for the five readings when read separately in both languages. When there was a switch from readings in Kannada to readings in English, there was a significant increase in the percentage of syllables stuttered. This increase in dysfluencies reduced the adaptation effect from repeated reading. These findings support the hypothesis that motor learning plays a crucial role in stuttering adaptation when participants read the same passage repeatedly in any language, but the shift in the language read suggests an interference in motor learning. Collectively, our results highlight an interaction effect between motor learning and language proficiency, seen by increased dysfluencies and a reduced adaptation effect in bilingual speakers.
This study examined the role of working memory on the parafoveal processing of Russian subject/object grammatical case. Previous work established that readers are disrupted by parafoveally viewed ungrammatical case markers when, upon fixation, they see the grammatical case, suggesting that readers started to interpret the sentence consistent with the information available in the parafovea. This study used participants’ working memory (adopted for Russian following Conway et al., 2005) and preview manipulation data from Stoops and Christianson (2017, 2019, 2020; 2022) to predict eye-movement measures. Readers with higher working memory were more disrupted by the related preview in gaze while lower working memory readers showed disruption in total time.
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.
