What We Know about the Acquisition of Russian Aspect as a First, Second, and Heritage Language: State of the Art

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This paper offers a state of the art review of the available linguistic scholarship on the acquisition of Russian aspect in various acquisition scenarios. While the studies reviewed here differ in their analyses of Russian verbal aspect, specific research questions, acquisition context, and research methodology, a common observation is that Russian aspectual contrasts are not easily acquired and that some may be more difficult to master than others. The review shows that some of these asymmetries are not unique to child grammars or to bilingual acquisition, but hold in all the acquisition contexts and may be determined by the complexity of the category itself, while others reflect developmental trends and effects of context and timing of acquisition. The paper starts with an overview of Russian aspect and the associated learning tasks, which is followed by the review of patterns emerging from studies on the acquisition of aspect by children, adult foreign language learners, and adult heritage speakers of Russian. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way these empirical findings can be connected to classroom contexts.