Ludmila Isurin’s research while affiliated with The Ohio State University and other places

The relationship between written and spoken recall (SR) has primarily been analyzed with English‐speaking monolinguals. Written recall (WR) has been reported more accurate due to higher cognitive load and attention required to produce a text. This study examined the written and spoken text recall relationship in L2 learners of Russian and analyzed how individual working memory (WM) capacity influenced both types of recall. Twenty‐two intermediate‐low learners of Russian participated in the study. The obtained results were consistent with results obtained from research on monolingual learners. WR was found more accurate than SR. The WM score did not correlate, however, with accuracy for either type of recall. This could be due to low cognitive demands of the chosen text required from the participants. A longer text is suggested for future studies. Also, second language acquisition studies analyzing a possibility of scaffolding L2 speaking accuracy by practicing L2 writing are encouraged. “How can we help our students improve their L2 speaking accuracy?” This is the question that most L2 educators ask themselves every day. Out of all existing methods, the role of L2 writing in scaffolding L2 speaking has often been overlooked. This study is an attempt to draw SLA researchers' attention to the great potential L2 writing has, in improving L2 speaking accuracy. This study also bridges the gap in our understanding of written and spoken recall of texts written in L2.

This book discusses how group memories about recent political events are constructed by the media of the group and how the information provided by the media is consumed by individual minds to form memories of those events. Based on the accumulated research in three distinct areas—collective memory, media, and the mind—the book offers an interdisciplinary sociocognitive framework within which a case study of Russian and American memory construction is investigated. The analysis of seven political events involving Russia that took place in the second decade of the 21st century and were discussed in Russian and American media outlets showed how ideological bias, distortion, and schemata worked to push against the other in an attempt to establish a narrative that reenacted an old and now reemerged enemy. By initially invoking not entirely forgotten stereotypes from the decades of the Cold War and later reinforcing those with new stories that perfectly fit old narrative frames, the two countries—via their respective media—became engaged in an information war that ultimately aimed at reaching the minds of people in those two countries. Those minds, however, while consciously questioning the trustworthiness of news coverage by their respective media, have formed memories along the ideological lines provided by the very media that they claim they do not trust. The book brings together two different methodologies and resources: content analysis of media texts and empirical data from human participants.

The present paper discusses findings from an empirical study looking into grammatical changes of Russian as the native language under the influence of English as a foreign language in a group of Russian-English bilinguals residing in the U.S. Twenty monolingual Russians and thirty Russian-English bilinguals participated in the study. All bilingual participants emigrated from Russia after their Russian language was fully acquired and had lived in the U.S. for 10-31 years prior to the time of the study. A semi-structured interview targeting autobiographical memories was employed as an elicitation technique. The analysis of narratives revealed distinctive changes in Russian in the two domains: word order and null subject use. The observed changes in the use of null pronominals suggested transfer from English. Bilinguals with more exposure to English used null pronominals less frequently. However, the directionality of effect in the use of the inverted word order by bilinguals was opposite to the predictions. Bilinguals with a very limited current exposure to Russian retained the inverted word order better than bilinguals with a broad exposure to Russian. Changes in the use of the inverted word order were partly attributed to the observed changes in the use of impersonal and existential sentences. The paper argues against cross-linguistic influence as the sole explanation of the first language changes.

This chapter looks at recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research that attempted to uncover a lost or suppressed childhood language both in adult and young adoptees as well as in those who were exposed to the language in childhood or learned a foreign language and later claimed to have forgotten it. It focuses on those studies where the search for memory traces of a lost language operates on the assumption that a language, once learned but later forgotten, leaves imprints in the person's brain that later facilitate relearning or identification of that language. The age factor in language acquisition, both first and second, often is related to the so‐called critical age hypothesis. The age regression technique is used in hypnosis in order to bring mental images to the mind of an individual and ask them to describe those images, aiming at the individual's speech production in the suppressed language.

The loss of a childhood language, especially in adoptees, has attracted scholars’ attention in the past, but a search for any memory traces has yielded conflicting results. In a psycholinguistic tradition known as the savings paradigm, a learn-and-relearn technique is employed to examine whether the relearning of lexical items once known, often in a second or foreign language, can lead to a rate of learning advantage for old (previously known) over new (previously unknown) words. The present study adopted this technique to examine remnants of a lost childhood language in TJ, an adoptee who did not know her linguistic background prior to her adoption at the age of 3 years. Delayed posttests provided evidence for the savings effect for old words: TJ showed better savings for words that were likely known in her childhood language at the age of 3. In contrast, the comparison group revealed no effect for old words over new ones.