Some Morphosyntactic Features of Russian as a Heritage Language in the Speech of Bi/Multilingual Children in Canada

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses the development of some features of morphology and syntax in the speech of bi/multilingual children in Saskatchewan, Canada, who are heritage speakers of Russian. The article reports on the results of a descriptive study examining some morpho-syntactic characteristics of the Russian speech of 29 children between 5 and 6 years old from immigrant families. These results are compared with a sample of speech data produced by Russian monolingual children (ML). This comparison demonstrates that child RHL speakers produce more morpho-syntactic non-canonical forms than their ML peers, but that the development of noun cases and verbal forms overall is similar to what is observed among ML speakers.