What is Difficult about Grammatical Gender? Evidence from Heritage Russian

Abstract

The paper examines the role of lexical, morphological, and discourse-referential factors in gender assignment with animate nouns in heritage Russian in order to explore the extent to which these different interfaces are challenging in heritage language acquisition. The analysis of concordant and discordant agreement patterns with nouns representing each type of gender categorization mechanism points to unequal difficulty associated with different types of gender allocation strategies. In particular, heritage speakers converge with baseline speakers in rating possible and impossible agreement combinations in the presence of fixed and transparent lexical and morphological gender categorization cues; however, they display non-target-like judgments of unmarked and underspecified forms characterized by variable agreement behavior (i.e., hybrid nouns and common gender nouns). Problems with forms whose gender reference is disambiguated at the level of discourse point to the syntax-discourse interface as a locus of systematic difficulty for heritage language speakers.