Natalia Gagarina

Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics · Language Development & Multilingualism

The goal of the CRC 1412 "Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" is to answer the overarching research question "What constitutes a language user's register knowledge?". Our starting point is the observation that many situational and functional parameters-such as the relation between the interlocutors, the purpose...

Language profiles of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) reveal a pattern of heterogeneous abilities, with receptive vocabulary exhibiting strengths over receptive grammar, and expressive language lagging behind. Little is known about inferential abilities in this population, in either children or adults, despite inferencing playing a pivotal role...

This study investigates the production of clausal embeddings by 195 Russian speakers (67 monolingually raised speakers, 68 heritage speakers in the US, and 60 heritage speakers in Germany) in different communicative situations varying by formality (formal vs. informal) and mode (spoken vs. written). Semi-spontaneous data were manually annotated for...

Research question How does Russian and German reading comprehension develop during the first 3 years of primary school in Russian heritage speakers and which factors predict performance in each language? Methodology 40 Russian-German children were tested annually from first to third grade (age in grade 1 M = 7; 1 years). Reading was assessed with...

Parent report measures have proven to be a valuable research tool to study early language development. Caregivers are given a list of words and are asked which of them their child has already used. However, most available measures are not suited for children beyond infancy, come with substantial licensing costs or lack a clear psychometric foundati...

Recently, Özge et al. have argued that Turkish and German monolingual 4-year-old children can interpret case-marking predictively disregarding word order. Heritage speakers (HSs) acquire a heritage language at home and a majority societal language which usually becomes dominant after school enrollment. Our study directly compares two elicitation mo...

Individual differences in early language abilities are an important predictor of later life outcomes. High-quality, easy-access measures of language abilities are rare, especially in the preschool and primary school years. The present study describes the construction of a new receptive vocabulary task for children between 3 and 8 years of age. The...

This volume contains ten papers that report on recent developments and new language versions of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Eight papers describe a MAIN language version, including the typological characteristics of the language, the cultural context in which the language is used, and the processes of translating a...

In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of the results from studies that have used the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to investigate comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure (story structure) to date. We show the wide range of research in which MAIN has been used through summaries of core results fr...

Introduction Studies have documented that child experiences such as external/environmental factors as well as internal factors jointly affect acquisition outcomes in child language. Thus far, the findings have been heavily skewed toward Indo-European languages and children in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societ...

Heritage languages may differ from baseline languages spoken in the home country, particularly in the domains of vocabulary, morphosyntax and phonology. The success of acquiring and maintaining a heritage language may depend on a range of factors, from the age of acquisition of the second language; quantity and quality of input and frequency of fir...

Heritage languages may differ from baseline languages spoken in the home country, particularly in the domains of vocabulary, morphosyntax and phonology. The success of acquiring and maintaining a heritage language may depend on a range of factors, from the age of acquisition of the second language; quantity and quality of input and frequency of fir...

Aims and objectives The current study examines the role of grammatical and positional parallelism on ambiguous German pronoun resolution in monolingual speakers and highly proficient L2 speakers with L1 Georgian. In particular, the study asks whether an object pronoun ihn in a sentence initial position could refer to the non-subject antecedent in a...

The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extr...

Individual differences in early language abilities are an important predictor of later life outcomes. High-quality, easy-access measures of language abilities are rare, especially in the preschool years. The present study describes the construction of a new receptive vocabulary task for children between 3 and 8 years of age. The task was implemente...

This chapter provides an outline of research on grammatical development within the context of early bilingual education and offers an overview of language support programs and their impact on the early grammatical development of bilingual preschool children. In particular, this chapter addresses studies investigating how grammar develops within var...

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering br...

This study addresses two major issues in childhood bilingualism: first language (L1) attrition and incomplete acquisition. It examines a group of bilingual ethnic minority (EM) children in Hong Kong acquiring Urdu as L1 and Cantonese as L2 and compares their L1 narrative and morphosyntactic abilities with their peers acquiring Urdu as L1 in Pakista...

The present study is devoted to the analysis of the macrostructure of oral narrative texts of Turkic-speaking bilingual schoolchildren. The research material was obtained using a MAIN — Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives — a tool for assessing the narrative abilities of bilinguals. Subjects for the analysis represent the most common...

This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies feat...

Heritage speakers (HSs) are known to differ from monolingual speakers in various linguistic domains. The present study focuses on the syntactic properties of monolingual and heritage Russian. Using a corpus of semi-spontaneous spoken and written narratives produced by HSs of Russian residing in the US and Germany, we investigate HSs’ word order pat...

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word omiss...

In Brazil, there is a sizeable population of elderly heritage speakers of Russian who descend from the first two immigration waves in the 20C (the first one after the Bolshevik Revolution, and the second one after the World War II), or are the third wave immigrants, stateless Russian refugees from China who came to Brazil as children in the 1950s w...

Russian and Turkish are the most frequently spoken and intensively investigated heritage languages in Germany, but contrastive research on their development in early childhood is still missing. This longitudinal study compares the trajectories of expressive lexicon development in Russian (n = 70) and Turkish (n = 79) heritage speakers and identifie...

This article introduces the LITMUS-MAIN (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-MAIN) and motivates the adaptation of this instrument into Chinese languages and language pairs involving a Chinese language, namely Cantonese, Mandarin, Kam, Urdu. We propose that these new adapted protocols not only contribute to the theoretical discussi...

This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines, specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS- MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language. Finally, the...

The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), an assessment tool in the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery, aims to improve the assessment of bilingual children. This paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Urdu. Given the lack of language assessment tools for Urdu-speaking children, the Ur...

ZasPiL 64.2020 contains 33 articles

The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), an assessment tool in the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery, aims to improve the assessment of bilingual children. This paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Urdu. Given the lack of language assessment tools for Urdu-speaking children, the Ur...

This paper introduces the Mandarin version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and describes the adaptation process. The Mandarin MAIN not only extends the empirical coverage of MAIN by including one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but also offers an important tool to assess the narrative abiliti...

This paper introduces the Kam version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). Kam is a minority language in southern China which belongs to the Kam-Tai language family and is spoken by the Kam ethnic minority people. Adding Kam to MAIN not only enriches the typological diversity of MAIN but also allows researchers to...

This paper gives an introduction to the Cantonese adaptation of Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), which is part of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery. We here discuss the motivation for adapting this assessment instrument into Cantonese, the adaptation process itself and potential conte...

The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is a theoretically grounded toolkit that employs parallelpictorial stimuli to explore and assess narrative skills in children in many different languages. It is part of the LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) battery of tests that were developed in connection wit...

The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is part of LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings). LITMUS is a battery of tests that have been developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (2009-2013).

This study investigates macrostructure in elicited narratives of 69 monolingual German-, Russian-and Swedish-speaking adults. Using the LITMUS-MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives), and its Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories, story structure and story complexity, concerning episodic organization, were examined across the 3 languag...

ZASPiL 62.2019 contains 10 articles.

For this study one hundred sixty-seven Russian-/Turkish-German preschool children were tested with a battery of language proficiency tests in both languages. On the basis of 1.5 SD below monolingual norm for L2 German and 1.25 SD below bilingual mean for either home language, 9 children at risk of developmental language disorders (DLD) (mean age of...

Multilingual children are faced with the task of selectively using the linguistic systems of their languages. Previous research has shown that although bilinguals may make more errors in production and comprehension than their monolingual peers, less cognitively demanding processing experiments may reveal target-like performance. This has been attr...

Zusammenfassung Während für den monolingualen Erwerb des Türkischen ausreichend Evidenzen vorliegen, dass Kasus innerhalb der ersten drei Lebensjahre erworben wird und Erwerbsprobleme ein sicherer Indikator für SSES sind, ist dies für den bilingualen Erwerb nicht ausreichend geklärt. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht in longitudinalen Daten von ung...

Bilingual children experience a rapid shift in language preference and input dominance from L1 to L2 upon entering kindergarten when regular contact with L2 starts. Though this change in dominance affects further L1 development, little is known about how various factors shape this. The present study examines the combined influence of different back...

Comprehension of sentences in the non-canonical word order usually poses problems for preschoolers (e.g., Slobin, Dan I. and Thomas G. Bever. 1982. Children use canonical sentence schema: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12. 229–265). These problems may be modulated by information structure, such as the presence of a...

Previous research on pronoun resolution in German revealed that personal pronouns in German tend to refer to the subject or topic antecedents, however, these results are based on studies involving subject personal pronouns. We report a visual world eye-tracking study that investigated the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on...

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledg...

Significance Although much research has been devoted to the acquisition of number words, relatively little is known about the acquisition of other expressions of quantity. We propose that the order of acquisition of quantifiers is related to features inherent to the meaning of each term. Four specific dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifier...

Production studies show that both Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and bilingual children for whom Russian is a non-dominant language have difficulty distinguishing between the near-synonymous connectives i ‘and’ and a ‘and/but’. I is a preferred connective when reference is maintained, whereas a is normally used fo...

Two studies examined the effects of age, gender, and task on Turkish narrative skills of Turkish–German bilingual children. In Study 1, 36 children (2 years, 11 months [2;11]–7;11) told stories in two conditions (“tell-after model” and “tell-no model”) and answered comprehension questions. In Study 2, 13 children (5;5–7;11) participated in two cond...

The goal of this study was to trace the dual language development of the narrative macrostructure in three age groups of Russian–German bilingual children and to compare the performance of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Fine-grained analyses of macrostructure included three components: story structure, story complexity, and internal state...

The number of bilingual children is growing dramatically all over the world. In 2010 the International Organization of Migration documented 214 million migrants worldwide, many bilingual (Koser & Laczko, 2010). One of the challenges arising from the rapid increase of bilingual children is scientifically grounded assessment of linguistic proficiency...

1. Einleitung, 2. Methodik, 3. Ergebnisse, 4. Diskussion, 5. Literatur

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugri...

1 Einleitung 2 Methodik 3 Ergebnisse 4 Diskussion 5 Fazit 6 Literatur