Native Russian Speakers Research Articles

Eye-Tracking Based L2 Detection: Universal and Specific Eye Movement Patterns in L1 and L2 Reading

Abstract The native (L1) and foreign (L2) languages a person speaks are an important constituent part of their individual profile. This study explores the potential of eye tracking as a diagnostic tool that allows to reliably identify reader non-nativeness in L1 and L2 text reading. The eye movements of native Russian-speaking students with above-average proficiency in both the languages were tracked while they were reading L1 and L2 texts. For selected measurement types such as average fixation duration, some general distributional patterns were confirmed. However, L2 reading also evidenced some distinct features compared to L1 performance, despite the readers’ high proficiency in both the languages. The distributional patterns for fixations and saccades in L1 and L2 reading can be informative to optimize adaptive thresholding algorithms of eye tracking based non-nativeness detection.

Идентичность в современных лингвистических исследованиях

Статья представляет собой обзор научных работ, посвящённых идентичности и её проявлению в языке и коммуникации. Традиционно данное понятие является объектом изучения философии, психологии, социологии и культурологии. В настоящее время оно заслуженно привлекает широкое внимание лингвистов, что неслучайно, так как язык представляет собой наиболее существенный признак идентичности. В работе рассматриваются различные типы идентичности, основное внимание уделяется лингвокультурной идентичности и её структурным компонентам, среди которых выделяются аксиологический, коммуникативный и эмоциональный. Прослеживается, как данные компоненты идентичности закрепляются в языке и проявляются в речи носителей русского и английского языков.

GENDER-BASED WORD DERIVATION: FEMININE VARIATIONS OF OCCUPATION TITLES AS SEEN BY MGIMO STUDENTS (EXPERIMENTAL STUDY)

The article represents the results of an experimental study conducted in the autumn of 2018 in Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University), which embraced 107 undergraduate and master degree students, studying German as the main foreign language. The study was aimed to bring out conservative and inventive trends in forming feminine gender markings (“feminatives”). An additional aim was to prove the anticipation that the morphological norms of the studied language (German) and foreign language cultural norms can transfer themselves onto the language of a student who is a Russian native speaker. For the study the method of a two-stage survey was chosen, the results of which were further processed utilizing IBM SPSS statistical software package. In the first stage the surveyed students were asked to build a feminine form for 60 denominations of professions or occupations given in a masculine form; in the second stage the surveyed were offered the list of variants to appraise through the prism of the language norm. The results obtained show that the forms belonging to the grammatical norm of the Russian language were statistically dominant. The anticipation that the norms of a studied language (German) can interfere with the speech culture of Russian native speakers was proven only partially. Occasional creative forms found in the survey replies reflect the balance existing between conservative and inventive linguistic trends.

Speech Emotion Recognition: Humans vs Machines

Introduction.The study focuses on emotional speech perception and speech emotion recognition using prosodic clues alone. Theoretical problems of defining prosody, intonation and emotion along with the challenges of emotion classification are discussed. An overview of acoustic and perceptional correlates of emotions found in speech is provided. Technical approaches to speech emotion recognition are also considered in the light of the latest emotional speech automatic classification experiments.Methodology and sources.The typical “big six” classification commonly used in technical applications is chosen and modified to include such emotions as disgust and shame. A database of emotional speech in Russian is created under sound laboratory conditions. A perception experiment is run using Praat software’s experimental environment.Results and discussion. Cross-cultural emotion recognition possibilities are revealed, as the Finnish and international participants recognised about a half of samples correctly. Nonetheless, native speakers of Russian appear to distinguish a larger proportion of emotions correctly. The effects of foreign languages knowledge, musical training and gender on the performance in the experiment were insufficiently prominent. The most commonly confused pairs of emotions, such as shame and sadness, surprise and fear, anger and disgust as well as confusions with neutral emotion were also given due attention.Conclusion.The work can contribute to psychological studies, clarifying emotion classification and gender aspect of emotionality, linguistic research, providing new evidence for prosodic and comparative language studies, and language technology, deepening the understanding of possible challenges for SER systems.

Aphoristic units recurrence in modern Russian language

Modern linguistics focuses on recurrence as a feature and category of various units of language and speech. In this regard, the contrastive analysis of recurrence and reproducibility on the material of set units is particularly relevant. The author attempts to differentiate recurrence and reproducibility at the phrase level. The aims of the work are to establish and describe the linguistically significant parameters of the aphoristic units’ recurrence. The material of the study is about 1000 recurrent aphoristic units in modern Russian language. The units are taken from phraseological and paremiological dictionaries and identified in the speech of native Russian speakers recorded in 2001-2018. The study determines the concept of phrase recurrence as regular phrase formation in typical contexts, not as their frequency as ready-made units in speech. The study identifies that recurrent aphoristic phrases do not have stable components, figurative meanings, neither on the whole nor of their components, and nominative semantics. Recurrent phrases do not refer to the so-called speech “standards” and “stereotypes” that function as “ready-made formulas” and their components have strong connection. Recurrent phrase has free components. Among different phrases with free components, recurrent phrases are close to set phrases in their structure and way of functioning. We can argue that the categorical difference between recurrent and set units is a criterion for determining the scope of phraseology as the part of the language system.

PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE REDUNDANCY ON THE EXAMPLE OF A SCIENTIFIC TEXT

Language redundancy is an actual problem for native Russian speakers. In this article, the authors consider the issue of linguistic redundancy in written communication, and describe some of its aspects using examples derived from various scientific and popular-scientific articles in the field of humanities (psychology, linguistics, literary criticism) selected from public Internet sources. The article describes the history of the scientific study of the problem of linguistic redundancy in texts of various styles, presents a typology of examples of linguistic redundancy primarily at the level of a combination of lexical units and at the level of text construction. The research also gives arguments on the reasons for linguistic redundancy emergence and possible steps to overcome it. The object of the study is a popular-scientific and scientific text, the subject of the study are stylistic errors and elements of language redundancy. The material of the analysis is represented in the texts obtained by the method of continuous sampling from collections of scientific articles in the Russian language, posted on the Internet. In each specific example, the authors propose their own way of expressing content without unnecessary lexical units, omitting or replacing them with synonyms and synonymous expressions. The stylistic error causing the problem of linguistic redundancy is a violation of the formal connection of sentences in the text, in which the reference words or link words are repeated. The article provides their typology and examples of errors of this type. The scientific novelty of the research is primarily related to the lack of research on linguistic redundancy on the material of scientific texts In Russian. The authors of the article see the practical value and possible implementation of the results in the drawing attention of the authors of scientific texts to their works in terms of their compliance with the norm in this aspect.

Perception of Word-level Prominence in Free Word Order Language Discourse.

This study examines the contribution of constituent order, prosody, and information structure to the perception of word-level prominence in Russian, a free word order language. Prominence perception is investigated through the analysis of prominence ratings of nominal words in two published narrative texts. Word-level perceived prominence ratings were obtained from linguistically naïve native speakers of Russian in two tasks: a silent prominence rating task of the read text passages, and an auditory prominence rating task of the same texts as read aloud by a native Russian speaker. Analyses of the prominence ratings reveal a greater likelihood of perceived prominence for words introducing discourse-new referents, as well as words occurring in a non-canonical sentence position, and featuring acoustic-prosodic enhancement. The results show that prosody and word order vary probabilistically in relation to information structure in read-aloud narrative, suggesting a complex interaction of prosody, word order, and information structure underlying the perception of prominence.

Russian word order of a transitive verb and its pronominal object

Russian is known as a SVO language. However, a general word order of a transitive verb and its pronominal object is not VO, but OV. This pronominal object has been syntactically regarded as Low Topic or Middle-Field Topic, and the SOV word order is introduced in Russian language textbooks. Russian native speakers, nevertheless, use SVO word order with the pronominal object. Thus this study explores why SVO word order is possible when a pronoun is an object. Even though the pronoun object is located at the end of the sentence, examples of SVO word order can be found to be context-neutral. By digitizing the voice information, we were able to find data with accurate accent patterns. In other words, it can be analyzed that SVO word order with a pronoun object is contextneutral when the pronoun loses its stress and becomes a clitic.

Beginning and Completion of Events in the Russian and English Language Picture of the World and Features of their Perception in the National Language Consciousness

Introduction. The question of the correspondence between the linguistic representation of concepts that make up the national linguistic picture of the world and the linguistic consciousness of the nation is examined on the basis of the concepts of the beginning and completion of the event. The grammatical structure of the language puts the native speaker in the framework of the concepts formed earlier and limits the choice to accessible language means.Methodology and sources. In order to determine the peculiarities of the perception of the event structure by native Russian and English speakers, as well as to establish how much the scope of concepts coincides or differs in national language pictures of the world, a comparative analysis of the dominant elements of the functional semantic fields of the beginning and completion of the event was used.Results and discussion. The analysis of linguistic means was carried out on the basis of the functional-semantic approach. Psycholinguistic analysis of linguistic consciousness was carried out on the basis of data from associative dictionaries of the Russian and English languages. The study also provides information on the structure of the event and statistical data describing the linguistic representation of the beginnings and completion in Russian and English at all levels from grammatical to syntactic.Conclusion. It was found out, that the source of semantic originality of the means of expression of beginning and end, constituting the corresponding functional semantic fields, can be not only differences in the grammatical system of the language, but also cultural-conditioned discrepancies in the scope of the concepts themselves. This means that the psycholinguistic features of concept perception in the national language consciousness have a direct impact on the choice of language means when translating or using the language as a means of communication by bilinguals.

Transcending the Vernacular in Fictional Portraits of Translators

This essay examines depictions of translation in three novels by contemporary translingual writers: Andreï Makine’s Le testament français (1995), Michael Idov’s Ground Up (2009) and Olga Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2013). All three authors are native speakers of Russian who write literary works in a non-native language and thus belong to a growing number of translingual writers from the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union. In each of the selected novels the narrator-protagonist is an immigrant who reflects upon the translingual condition, i.e. the practical and existential challenges of speaking, writing and living in a non-native language. Translation is intrinsic to the plots, characterization and themes of these novels, all of which depict language-switching in various contexts. The Russian protagonist of Makine’s Le testament français writes in French and resorts to the subterfuge of a pseudotranslation in order to get his books accepted by a Paris publisher. Idov’s Ground Up chronicles the business failure of a Viennese-style café in New York along with the narrator’s failure to realize the cosmopolitan ideal that it embodies. Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt portrays the challenges faced by a polyglot interpreter who aims for professional mobility in a globalized world. In each of the novels, translation is associated with performance and deception, serving also as a metaphor for translingual experience. Drawing on Alexander Beecroft’s concept of ecologies of literature – in particular, vernacular, cosmopolitan, national and global literary ecologies – the analysis considers how these novels depict translation and circulation in various contexts, including everyday communication, business ventures and literary markets. I argue the fictional characters’ ideals and approaches to language-switching can be understood in terms of vernacular, cosmopolitan and global modes.

ЧАСТОТНЫЕ ДОМИНАНТЫ И ОПРЕДЕЛЯЮЩИЕ ИХ ФАКТОРЫ

The article is devoted to identifying the basic factors determining the frequency dominants of words. The study contributes to developing a system of word usage preferences, which the native Russian speakers are intuitively guided by to represent meaningful semantic components. It includes the following word groups: words with positive assessment but lacking subjective evaluation, designations of subjective possibilities; words with neutral style and stylistic colouring; words, semantics of which does not include the semes “absence, deprivation of something”, different types of quantitative semes and semes of reflexivity. The study is based on the linguistic material acquired from the frequency dictionary of Russian; the comparative analysis method is applied to analyze the frequency of contrastive words.

Effects of Visual Priming and Event Orientation on Word Order Choice in Russian Sentence Production.

Existing research shows that distribution of the speaker’s attention among event’s protagonists affects syntactic choice during sentence production. One of the debated issues concerns the extent of the attentional contribution to syntactic choice in languages that put stronger emphasis on word order arrangement rather than the choice of the overall syntactic frame. To address this, the current study used a sentence production task, in which Russian native speakers were asked to verbally describe visually perceived transitive events. Prior to describing the target event, a visual cue directed the participants’ attention to the location of either the agent or the patient of the subsequently presented visual event. In addition, we also manipulated event orientation (agent-left vs. agent-right) as another potential contributor to syntactic choice. The number of patient-initial sentences was the dependent variable compared between conditions. First, the obtained results replicated the effect of visual cueing on the word order in Russian language: more patient-initial sentences in patient cued condition. Second, we registered a novel effect of event orientation: Russian native speakers produced more patient-initial sentences after seeing events developing from right to left as opposed to left-to-right events. Our study provides new evidence about the role of the speaker’s attention and event orientation in syntactic choice in language with flexible word order.

C-34 An Investigation into the Multicultural Properties of the Clock Drawing Test: Findings from a Russian-speaking Sample

Abstract Objective The Clock Drawing Test (CDT) is a screening instrument for cognitive impairment known for its quick and easy administration style. Studies have examined if different qualitative errors on the CDT discriminate cognitive impairment from normal aging. Moreover, current research has investigated qualitative errors on the CDT in various populations (i.e. Brazil, Japan, Korea). To the best of the authors’ knowledge however, there has been no previous research on qualitative errors seen on the CDT within Russian-speaking populations. To address this gap, the present study examined qualitative errors committed on the CDT by native Russian-speakers compared to English-speaking counterparts. Method Data was retrospectively collected from a sample comprised of 13 Russian-speaking immigrants and 29 English-speakers. All participants were seen for neuropsychological testing at an outpatient clinic in eastern Massachusetts and diagnosed with major neurocognitive disorder. Results Contingency analysis revealed no significant differences in qualitative errors when comparing Russian-speakers with major neurocognitive disorder to English-speakers diagnosed with the same. Conclusions Due to similar frequencies of qualitative errors between these groups, these results suggest that the CDT may have broad utility for assessing gross cognitive functioning regardless of a patient’s native language or cultural background.

L3 Sentence Processing: Language-Specific or Phenomenon-Sensitive?

The article investigates non-native sentence processing and examines the existing scholarly approaches to L2 processing with a population of L3 learners of English, whose native language is Russian. In a self-paced reading experiment, native speakers of Russian and English, as well as (low) intermediate L3 learners of English, read ambiguous relative clauses (RC) and decided on their attachment interpretation: high attachment (HA) or low attachment (LA). In the two-by-two design, linguistic decision-making was prompted by lexical semantic cues vs. a structural change caused by a certain type of matrix verb. The results show that whenever a matrix verb caused a change of syntactic modification, which entailed HA, both native and non-native speakers abandoned the default English-like LA and chose HA. Lexical semantic cues did not have any significant effect in RC attachment resolution. The study provides experimental evidence in favor of the similarity of native and non-native processing strategies. Both native speakers and L3 learners of English apply structural processing strategies and show similar sensitivity to a linguistic prompt that shapes RC resolution. Native and non-native processing is found to be prediction-based; structure building is performed in a top-down manner.

Construal vs. redundancy: Russian aspect in context

AbstractThe relationship between construal and redundancy has not been previously explored empirically. Russian aspect allows speakers to construe situations as either Perfective or Imperfective, but it is not clear to what extent aspect is determined by context and therefore redundant. We investigate the relationship between redundancy and open construal by surveying 501 native Russian speakers who rated the acceptability of both Perfective and Imperfective verb forms in complete extensive authentic contexts. We find that aspect is largely redundant in 81% of uses, and in 17% of contexts aspect is relatively open to construal. We contend that anchoring in redundant contexts likely facilitates the independence of construal in contexts with less redundancy. However further research is needed to discover what makes contexts redundant since known cues for aspect are absent in the majority of such contexts. Native speakers are fairly consistent in giving the original aspect high ratings, but less consistent in rating the non-original aspect, indicating potential problems in testing the reactions of speakers to non-authentic data.

ОТРАЖЕНИЕ КОНЦЕПТА ПАТРИОТ В КИТАЙСКОЙ И РУССКОЙ ЯЗЫКОВЫХ КАРТИНАХ МИРА (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ АССОЦИАТИВНОГО ЭКСПЕРИМЕНТА)

The article analyses the results of two associative experiments: the native Russian speakers’ response to the stimulus word “патриот” and the native Chinese speakers’ response to the stimulus word “àiguózhě” (patriot). The authors compare the means of linguistic representation of PATRIOT concept in the consciousness of the Russian and Chinese native speakers by means of modelling the associative fields of concepts ПАТРИОТ and ÀIGUÓZHĚ. The study is based on chain associative experiment data. The analysis of linguistic material has allowed identifying meaningful semantic components of concepts ПАТРИОТ and ÀIGUÓZHĚ and revealing similarities and differences in the concept verbalization in the Russian and Chinese national worldviews.

Word creation in Internet network and language ecology

The article is dedicated to holophrastic neologisms i.e. blended words constructed on the basis of word combinations. The author focuses on emotiveness of holophrastic structures in political texts represented in the Internet. A dynamic contradiction between the violation of a norm, taking place in new words formation (those new words are considered as occasionalisms of holophrastic type) and new ways of emotiveness representation has been studied from the viewpoint of language ecology. In course of research, more than 100 texts and microtexts were analyzed; at the same time, the ironic potential, language games and the possibility of self-expression of the subject turned out to be characteristic of political texts. As the main research technique, we used continuous sample of holophrastic set expressions; in addition, in order to obtain objective data, such services as Yandex and Google have been used. Holophrastic set expressions have been treated as a result of word formation and representation of such linguistic personality as native speaker of Russian.

КОГНИТИВНАЯ СТРУКТУРА СКАЗОЧНОЙ АЛЛЮЗИИ С КОМПОНЕНТОМ «ЗОЛУШКА» (CINDERELLA): СРАВНИТЕЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ НА ОСНОВЕ КОРПУСНОГО ПОДХОДА

The article provides a comparative analysis of a fairy-tale allusion functioning in the speech of native speakers of Russian and American English. The study focuses on identifying nationally specific components of the cognitive structure of the allusion with the component Золушка/Cinderella and on describing the peculiarities of the linguistic worldview, which influence the coding and decoding of an image. The analysed frames and sub-frames constituting the structure of this allusion manifested cardinally different associative relations actualized during its usage and, consequently, different motivation for using the allusion based on this comparison.

CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER CLASSROOM L3 ACQUISITION IN UNIVERSITY SETTING

Introduction: the paper investigates cross-linguistic influences between the two previously learnt languages and their effects on classroom L3 acquisition. The study checks the predictions of the existing theories of mechanisms of transfer into the L3 attested for naturalistic learners. The main predictions get confirmed with the population of classroom learners of English as the L3. All the participants are native speakers of Russian. They all learnt their dominant foreign language, either French or German, in the classroom. The results suggest a governing role of the Universal Grammar in classroom language learning. Materials and Methods: the experiment uses three production tasks: written production, oral production and pronunciation task. The written assignment asks the participants to translate sentences from Russian into English. The target sentence contains the existential there are that does not exist in Russian. The way the participants structure the target sentence in English allows for conclusion about possible influences of the first foreign language on the development of their L3- English. In the oral production task, the participants are prompted to produce negative sentences. The influences from previously learnt languages is traced through the placement of the negation not. In the pronunciation task Praat was used to measure the duration and the formant frequency of the nasal [N] in English. Differences in sound quality trace back to the influences from the previously learnt languages. The data were analyzed with one-way ANOVA for between and within group differences. Results: in the written task, the participants who studied German as their first foreign language prefer verb final placement in the subordinate, which is ungrammatical in English but grammatical in German. The L2-French group put the verb in the right place, but they do not use the existential there are, which required in English. In the oral task, the placement of negation is Russian-like in both groups. In pronunciation, the quality of English [N] is influenced by the amount of nasality the participants learnt before, i.e. French influences make the English [N] more nasalized than the [N] in the group with German as the first foreign language. Discussion and Conclusion: classroom learners of English as the L3 experience influences from all the previously learnt languages, the native language and the first foreign language. These findings pattern with the assumptions of the main generative theories of naturalistic L3 acquisition. Concluding that classroom language learning is governed by universal grammar, the teaching can benefit from predicting what cross-linguistic influences can be facilitative or not for the acquisition of the target language.

Linguistic Intercomprehension in Vocational Translation Training (The Case of English, Spanish, Russian)

According to a common adage, translation is not about translating words but about translating meanings. One and the same meaning, thus, in different languages can be rendered by different linguistic means. Mastering the art of translation often means juggling a variety of these linguistic means in two or more languages. Traditionally, translators for international organizations have worked from a foreign language (so- called languages B/C) into their native language (so-called language A). Today, however, in the increasingly global world, translators are more often than not required to be able to work into at least one, usually two, foreign languages. Moreover, sometimes translators may find themselves tasked with working from language C into language B, i.e. from one foreign language into another, leaving their native language out of the equation altogether. Schools of translation do not normally offer this kind of training. To respond to the growing professional demand, however, there emerged a need for research and teaching strategy development for such a course. This paper outlines a sequence of teaching activities for a group of Russian speaking students majoring in International Media and Communication Studies at MGIMO-University (Moscow State Institute of International Relations). The students, all of whom are native Russian speakers, have reached CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) C1 level in English and CEFR B2 in Spanish, and are currently taking two professionally-oriented translation courses, from English into Russian and from Spanish into Russian. The paper puts forward a lesson plan where the students are taught translation from Spanish (language C) into English (language B). The activities are aimed at identifying syntactical and lexical differences and similarities between English and Spanish, as well as conducting a comparative analysis of the students’ native language, Russian. The paper argues that translation from one foreign language into another is facilitated by linguistic intercomprehension, a field in linguistic research that emerged relatively recently and has so far mainly focused on intercomprehension in language teaching.