Resolving Indeterminacy in Gender Agreement: Comparing Heritage Speakers and L2 Learners of Russian

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, both heritage language (HL) speakers and second language (L2) learners have been shown to experience difficulty in producing and interpreting linguistic structures characterized by indeterminacy, or lack of an invariable and transparent relationship between meaning and form. This article compares two populations of Russian-English bilinguals on their strategies of resolving ambiguity within the system of grammatical gender in Russian, with a particular focus on indeterminacy in gender agreement with animate nouns. As a result of complex interactions among lexical, morpho-phonological, and discourse-level gender categorization cues, the agreement behavior of animate nouns in Russian is not fully uniform. The results of a scaled acceptability ratings study demonstrate that gender agreement in transparent and non-ambiguous contexts is largely unproblematic for both bilingual groups; however, contexts that require conflict resolution between different types of cues and those characterized by underspecification represent two areas where HL speakers and L2 learners diverge from monolingual Russian-speaking controls. Across all experimental conditions, bilingual speakers demonstrate a higher reliance on morpho-phonological gender categorization cues and assign less weight to lexical and referential factors in gender assignment than monolinguals. The results further show that the two populations of bilinguals are not fully alike with respect to dealing with different types of indeterminacy. In particular, HL speakers exhibit an advantage over L2 learners in conflict resolution; however, both bilingual groups struggle with constructions that give rise to referential ambiguity due to underspecification. These results expand our understanding of the problem of indeterminacy in bilingual acquisition of gender and offer implications for theories of language acquisition and language instruction.