Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures

The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line of inquiry to Bulgarian, a language where clitic placement is subject to strong prosodic constraints. We found t...

We tested predictive gender agreement processing in adjective-noun phrases by 45 4-to-6-year-old Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children using the Visual World eye-tracking paradigm. Russian and Bulgarian are closely related languages that have three genders but differ in the nature and number of gender cues on adjectives. Analysis of the proporti...

We review some of the topics that have received the most attention, such as acquisition and processing of the phenomena in the nominal (i.e. gender, case) and verbal domains (i.e. aspect and predicate-argument structure), as well as monolingual and bilingual language representation and processing of syntactic dependencies in Slavic. Our goal is to...

Previous research has shown that the computation of subject-verb number agreement can be derailed by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns, a phenomenon called agreement attraction. By contrast, the incidence of agreement attraction with anaphoric dependencies is less clear: Previous work has mostly focused on reflexives and strong pronouns,...

The early stages of lexical development in children pose various questions about the selection and application of word-learning heuristics. In many proposals these processes are assumed to be facilitated by a specific lexical bias that differs in strength in monolingual and bilingual populations, namely, the Mutual Exclusivity (ME) bias (Markman &...

Rodnaya Rech' ('mother tongue') is the newest publication in the field of educational materials for HL learners. Written by two experts in HL research and pedagogy, it is comprehensive, engaging, and student-centered. The course has several components, which are distributed in various formats. The main publication, the textbook, is available in pri...

In this article, we examine the origins and the development of wine culture in Slav-ic-speaking areas beginning in prehistoric times and continuing until the late Pro-to-Slavic period. We discuss linguistic and archeological evidence to trace the PSl term *vino by focusing on different hypotheses about its origin as a native inheritance from PIE vs...

The study investigates the acquisition of direct object clitics by a bilingual Bulgarian-English child in the USA. The data are based on weekly audio and video recordings of the child’s production as well as a detailed diary for the period between 2;0 and 4;0 years. Monolingual Bulgarian children start producing adult-like proclitics (the default i...

Тransparency of gender markers facilitates gender acquisition, but few studies investigated it in closely related languages, in which transparency can interact with the distributional regularity of these markers. This is the first contrastive study of gender acquisition in Russian and Bulgarian, which have similar gender systems but differ in the d...

Immigration experience is a multifaceted phenomenon that presents unique opportunities for combining academic and community-engaged learning in meaningful ways. The present study focuses on the student learning outcomes of a community-based project that was part of the academic curriculum in a large public university in the USA. The research object...

Review of 'Bulgarian Grammar' by R. Nicolova (2017)

This study investigates the ways adult Russian heritage speakers establish and maintain referential and relational coherence in oral narratives produced in Russian on the basis of a short video segment. The experimental group consisted of 34 Russian heritage speakers who were compared to the control group of monolingual Russian speakers (N=33) and...

InTheoretical and Experimental Aspects of Syntax-Discourse Interface in Heritage Grammars,Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan investigates comprehension and production of anaphoric dependencies in heritage Russian. She explains the representational and processing mechanisms behind the divergent behaviour of the experimental group.

The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to L1/L2,...

The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to L1/L2,...