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Grammatical gender in bilingual Norwegian–Russian acquisition: The role of input and transparency*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

YULIA RODINA  and
MARIT WESTERGAARD
YULIA RODINA*
Affiliation:
University of Oslo
MARIT WESTERGAARD
Affiliation:
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
*
Address for correspondence: Yulia Rodina, University of Oslo, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, P.O. Box 1102 Blindern, 0316 Oslo, Norway[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates the role of parental input and transparency in the acquisition of two different gender systems, Norwegian and Russian, by bilingual children living in Norway. While gender in Russian is generally predictable from the morphophonological shape of the noun (with some exceptions), gender assignment in Norwegian is opaque. An experimental production study was carried out with two groups of bilinguals, children with one or two Russian-speaking parents, and monolingual controls (age 4;1–7;11). The findings show that both groups of bilinguals perform similarly to monolinguals in Norwegian, the majority language, despite the lack of transparency. In Russian, on the other hand, not only quantitative, but also qualitative differences are found in the data of the bilingual children with the least exposure to the language. These qualitative differences indicate that early age of onset is not sufficient to acquire phenomena such as gender; extensive input is necessary.

Keywords

bilingualismgrammatical genderquantitative/qualitative differencesRussianNorwegian
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 197 - 214
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank our participants, their parents and the research assistants who worked with us on this project. We are grateful to Martin Corley, Björn Lundquist and Jeffrey Chrabaszcz for help with statistical analysis of the data, to the audience of GALA 2013, MIMS 2, TromSlang, and IASCL 2014 for insightful comments, and to three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript. This research was supported in part by a grant from the Tromsø Research Foundation and by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.

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