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УДК 81.23 https://doi.org/10.33910/2687-0215-2021-3-1-16-27
Russian noun pluralization in bilingual children: Evidence from four countries. Part 1. Qualitative analysis
M. Minkov 1, E. Dieser 2, M. Polinsky 3, E. Protassova H4, M. Schwartz 5
1 Tel Aviv University, 55 Haim Levanon, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel
2 Universität Würzburg, 2 Sanderring, Würzburg 97070, German
3 University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, U.S.A.
4 University of Helsinki, 4 Yliopistonkatu, Helsinki 00100, Finland
5 Oranim Academic College of Education, Tivon 3600600, Israel
Authors
Miriam Minkov, ORCID: 0000-0002-5862-1403, e-mail: miryamminkov@gmail.com Elena Dieser, ORCID: 0000-0002-5862-1403, e-mail: elena.dieser@uni-wuerzburg.de Maria Polinsky, ORCID: 0000-0003-1460-5089, e-mail: polinsky@umd.edu Ekaterina Protassova, ORCID: 0000-0002-8271-4909, e-mail: ekaterina.protassova@helsinki.fi Mila Schwartz, ORCID: 0000-0002-3175-9357, e-mail: milasch@post.bgu.ac.il
For citation: Minkov, M., Dieser, E., Polinsky, M., Protassova, E., Schwartz, M. (2021) Russian noun pluralization in bilingual children: Evidence from four countries. Part 1. Qualitative analysis. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Lexicography, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 16-27. https://doi.org/10.33910/2687-0215-2021-3-1-16-27
Received 9 July 2021; reviewed 20 October 2021; accepted 7 November 2021.
Funding: The study did not receive any external funding.
Copyright: © M. Minkov, E. Dieser, M. Polinsky, E. Protassova, M. Schwartz (2021). Published by Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia. Open access under CC BY-NC License 4.0
Abstract. The Russian language is confronted with a variety of other languages from around the world on the individual level. Russian is spoken by a large proportion of the population in some countries. As a result, it is necessary to investigate how the home / family or the first language (L1) interacts with the language of the environment in early childhood and how this influences the acquisition results at various stages. The aim of the study was: (1) to compare the pattern of noun pluralization in Russian (L1) among monolingual Russian-speaking and bilingual (L1) Russian-speaking children; (2) to examine the possible role of L2 background in production of noun plurals in L1 Russian. The participants included four groups of 4- to 5-year-old bilingual children with Russian as L1 and English, German, Finnish, or Hebrew as L2, who were compared to monolingual children in Russia in two age groups (3-4 and 4-5 years of age). A semi-structured elicitation test was conducted. Our findings revealed no qualitative difference between the groups on noun pluralization. Even if this is the case, some minor negative influence was evident in the children with English as L2, which is characterized by most regular noun pluralization. The presence of a grammar category in L2 plays the central role in the acquisition of this category in L1. Still, it is not clear what the role of L2 is: maybe the bilingual children are so good with Russian plural marking because their L2 has plural marking or because Russian is their dominant language and they have had a lot more input in it, so that the status of their L2 is irrelevant. The article actually consists of two parts, each dealing with qualitative and quantitative analysis, respectively.
Keywords: plural of the Russian nouns, child language development, bilingualism, regular endings, cross-linguistic comparison, acquisition errors
Introduction
The ability to discriminate between one and many objects is one of the most significant cognitive categories, which is reflected, among other things, in understanding the opposition of singular and plural nouns in the Russian language. Noun pluralization in Russian is a complex process, which includes both regular and irregular plural noun forms, e. g., stem change, unpredictable endings, and suppletive nouns (Pesetsky 2013; Savinova, Malyutina 2021; Zaliznyak 2002). Although acquisition of regular and irregular noun pluralization was discussed mainly in relation to monolingual children (e. g., Tomasello 2003), little is yet known about acquisition of noun plurals in bilingual versus monolingual contexts (Jia 2003; Schwartz et al. 2009). The aim ofthe present study was to add to the existing limited research by comparing bilingual (L1) Russian-speaking children to their monolingual Russian-speaking peers based on their mastery of noun pluralization in Russian.
The plural emerges as one of the earliest categories in child language development (Berman 1985; Brown 1973; El'konin 1973; Slobin 1985). In addition, noun pluralization exists in many languages and often presents significant structural complexity (Ravid et al. 2008). Noun pluralization also plays a key role in the morphology of noun phrases and activates grammatical agreement, thus constituting a basic category in acquisition, although the trajectory of its acquisition may span well into school age (e. g., Tsejtlin 2000).
In this study we specifically examined acquisition of plurals for a number of reasons. All the four second languages (Finnish, Hebrew, English, and German) have grammatical marking of the plural number. Hence, all these languages are characterized by some degree of typological proximity to Russian in terms of noun pluralization. However, these languages differ considerably in the degree of complexity of noun pluralization. In this case, an intriguing question was whether the bilingual groups in our study would be all alike or different in their production of noun plurals in Russian (L1) compared to their monolingual Russian-speaking peers. In other words, whether our results would provide an argument for the role of typological proximity, namely the presence of plural inflections in L2, or whether this proximity would play a minor role in light of the fact that Finnish, German, Hebrew, and English differ significantly in characteristics and complexity of noun pluralization.
Our goal in the current study was twofold: (1) to compare the pattern of noun pluralization in Russian (the first language, L1) among monolingual and bilingual Russian-speaking children with L1 Russian; (2) to examine the possible role of L2 background in production of noun plurals in L1 Russian. This study was part of a larger research project designed to examine the role of diverse L2 backgrounds (Finnish, German, Hebrew, and English) in core grammar acquisition in L1 Russian. Schwartz et al. (2015) focused their study on gender agreement in the early sequential bilinguals versus their monolingual peers. The findings showed that bilingual development in L1 follows the same developmental path as monolingual development, albeit with a delay. In addition, the results evidenced a clear-cut effect of L2 background on Russian (L1) gender agreement acquisition. Bilingual children whose L2 has grammatical gender (German, Hebrew) outperformed the other bilinguals in terms of gender agreement, indicating that the presence of a grammatical category in both languages facilitates acquisition if this category. Gender as a category is absent in Finnish and English. This may explain differential effects of L2 on the acquisition of gender by Russian bilinguals. The grammatical category of number is present in all the languages under discussion; hence, its acquisition by bilinguals might differ from that of gender. The cohorts for both studies match each other.
Noun pluralization acquisition in a bilingual context
Many studies have examined the path to noun pluralization mastery in monolingual children (Clahsen et al. 1992; Kopcke 1998; Marcus et al. 1995) and in L2 acquisition (Kopcke, Wecker
2016). However, in the context of childhood bilingualism, only few studies to date have focused directly on this facet of inflectional morphology and on noun pluralization in particular.
Schwartz et al. (2009) examined how children who were sequentially bilingual in Russian and Hebrew and those who only spoke Hebrew acquired irregular forms of Hebrew plural nouns; at that time monolingual Hebrew-speaking children were still learning these forms. The comparison was done at the beginning of the second grade (with 7-year-old children) and at the beginning of the third grade (with 8-year-olds). Children were asked to name the plural forms of specific objects in an elicitation task which focused on irregular plurals. The bilingual children continued to produce the irregular forms less accurately than their monolingual peers at the second data collection point, but the difference between the groups was minimal. Both groups significantly improved in all categories of irregular plural forms over the course of a single academic year. Finally, it was discovered that bilingual children exhibited similar patterns of developmental errors and mastered irregular plural forms of the Hebrew noun system in a manner similar to their monolingual peers.
Jia (2003) conducted a 5-year longitudinal study of 10 native Mandarin-speaking children, who came to the United States at the age of 5-16 years, focusing on their L2-English acquisition of noun pluralization. Their progress in plural form production was measured by a picture description task and by their spontaneous speech. One of the findings was that, although the bilinguals needed a longer time span to reach the plural mastery stage than L1 learners (7-33 months vs. 17-21 months), the average time points of plural mastery were similar (20 months vs. 19 months) for L2 and L1 learners. In addition, quantitative differences were found between L2 and L1 learners: bilinguals more frequently marked the same noun inconsistently in the same testing session, namely they used both correct and incorrect forms of irregular plurals, e. g., feet and foots), and more often overgeneralized the plural morpheme in singular or mass noun contexts. However, Jia (2003) found similarities in the patterns of developmental errors on plural production between English L2 and L1 learners (e. g., overregularization of the morpheme -s by adding it to roots with irregular plural forms, man-s instead of men).
The existing limited data on production of plural noun forms by simultaneous and sequential bilingual children compared to their monolingual peers indicate similarity in the patterns of developmental errors and a tendency to overgeneralization of the default grammatical morpheme. The irregular suffixation and stem changes, which were observed as developmental errors in monolingual production, were found to be even more challenging for bilingual children. The higher frequency in the production of the developmental errors might be due to limited L1/L2 input because the bilinguals are exposed to each language to a lesser degree than monolingual children (Kupisch et al. 2002; Nicoladis et al. 2007). Vorobyeva (2020) showed that noun gender agreement in Russian heritage speakers follows different strategies under the influence of Spanish and/or Catalan. Children's mastery of some exceptional grammatical forms may be influenced by how frequently they hear them. These forms cannot be acquired by a generalized rule and must instead be learned one at a time as distinct lexical units. The factor of frequency of input and output in bilingual acquisition was related to Bybee's (Bybee 1995; 2001) and Tomasello's (2003) usage-based theories, which emphasize that "language structure emerges from language use" (Tomasello 2003, 5).
The present study
The main goal of this study was to examine acquisition of plural noun forms in Russian by comparing bilingual children with diverse L2 backgrounds and one-year-younger and age-matched monolingual children. The motivation behind comparing the bilingual groups to monolinguals who are a year younger (as well as those who are age-matched) is that bilinguals are supposed to have the same level of Russian as monolinguals who are a year younger according
to many other studies, and the basis for this expectation is that they have less input in Russian (cf. Nicoladis et al. 2012). It would make sense to match bilinguals to monolinguals on the basis of some external measure — such as MLU or PPVT, for instance — but for many, mostly technical, reasons we did not do this.
We intended to investigate the influence of L2 grammar on acquisition ofplural noun forms by (L1) Russian-speaking children. Our research questions were as follows:
(1) What are qualitative and quantitative (distribution, frequency) characteristics of errors in production of plural noun forms in Russian (L1) among bilingual Russian-speaking children and monolingual children?
(2) What effect does L2 grammar context have on the acquisition of plural noun forms in Russian (L1) among bilingual (L1) Russian-speaking children?
We concentrate on the Russian language of the immigrants' children from Russian-speaking communities living in Finland, Germany, Israel, and the United States in order to provide answers to these questions. We are aware that it can be challenging to distinguish between what constitutes "evidence of L2 grammar" and what does not. We were able to investigate the role of L2 grammar in young bilinguals' acquisition of L1 by including a variety of L2s.
These were the predictions we made: it would prove that the bilinguals and monolinguals took divergent developmental paths in learning Russian plural nouns if the differences in agreement patterns between the two groups turned out to be qualitative. The previous data would not be supported if the bilingual groups under investigation varied only quantitatively from the monolingual groups, and the notion that plural noun acquisition is sensitive to reduced input would still be upheld.
To examine the role of L2, we compared four L2s in which the noun pluralization category has different degrees of complexity. If the bilingual groups in our study were found to be all alike, this would provide an argument against interference from the characteristics of the target grammatical category in each case. This would support the argument for the importance of the existence of the grammatical category per se in L2 as a positive factor for its acquisition in L1, although not without a comparison to an L2 which lacks this category (i. e., a language with no nominal plural marking), which we do not have in our case. If the bilingual groups in this study were found to differ in their production of the plural nouns regardless of the existence of this category in their L2s, this might indicate that the presence of the category itself is not such an influential factor in bilingual development. Yet, it would, first of all, indicate that the exact instantiation and nature of this category has an influence. However, without a theoretical model of plural marking in the five languages under study, no specific predictions can be formulated for how particular L2s might affect Russian in this domain. Simple differences do not necessarily point to the role of the different L2s; they could be due to, e. g., the bilinguals in Israel getting more Russian input than the bilinguals in Germany, and hence making fewer errors. Similarly to Russian, the three languages — Finnish, German, and Hebrew — are characterized by a relatively high level of complexity in terms of noun pluralization. This is expressed by the presence of a number of plural suffixes or their allomorph forms and, arbitrarily of their assignment, existence of irregular suffixation and changeable and non-salient stems in noun pluralization. In English, however, in 98% of cases pluralization is formed regularly (Marcus et al. 1995).
The study took place in four different countries where Russian is an immigrants' language and in Russia (the control monolingual group). The diaspora of Russian speakers is dedicated to the Russian language and culture, but they are also adept at learning new tongues and cultures (Ben-Rafael et al. 2006; Protassova et al. 2021). Russian culture places a high value on language preservation; so immigrant parents who speak the language have invested in teaching it to their offspring. In each of the four countries in question, Russian communities have established early bilingual education facilities. We conceptualized the comparative study of the Russian noun
pluralization pattern in this broad context. According to parents' questionnaires and teachers' interviews, all participants were typically developing children; they were regularly tested by country-specific procedures; they came from families who used more Russian than any other language at home; and Russian was their active language. We did not measure the children's Russian proficiency and/or dominance and children's ability to form plurals in their L2. Knowledge of the children's Russian proficiency could lead to different interpretations. In all cases, they had at least two years of exposure to the dominant language of surroundings.
Method
Participants
Our research design was based on a cross-sectional comparison among four groups of bilingual preschool children from the four countries and two groups of their monolingual peers. The bilingual participants were 4-5 y. o. The control set comprised two monolingual groups of Russian-speaking children in a preschool in Saint Petersburg, Russia — the younger group of 3-4 year olds and the elder group of 4-5 year olds. The data in monolingual and bilingual groups were collected at the same time. All the children were matched by socioeconomic status (average-high).
We attended parent-teacher meetings in these preschools in the middle of the academic year and communicated with parents directly. As a result, approximately 60% parental consent was obtained. The parents completed the consent form by answering several questions about their socio-cultural background: parents' education, immigrant status, and the age of onset ofpreschool education. All parents were native Russian-speakers. They had emigrated from the former Soviet Union and had been residing in the host country for at least five years. The level of education of most parents was reported as high (college and university level), which is typical for immigrants who prefer to maintain their children's Russian in an immigrant setting.
In addition, the parents gave us a report about their language practice at home, such as parent-child language, the language of parent-child reading, the language of TV exposure, etc. In accordance with this report, in the bilingual groups (L2 English, German, Hebrew, and Finnish), input at home was mostly in Russian. Children's exposure to L2 began with the entrance to bilingual preschool at ages 2-3.
The bilingual preschools applied the developmental enrichment bilingual program with Russian maintenance for the children from Russian-speaking linguistic backgrounds. This bilingual education model is "aimed toward not only maintenance but development and extension of the minority languages" (Hornberger 1991, 222). In the case of Finland and Germany, this program enrolled children from both Russian-speaking homes and Finnish- or German-speaking homes. In the case of Israel and the United States, most of the population constituted second-generation immigrants from Russian-speaking communities.
As indicated above, L2 onset of the participants took place at ages 2-3. Research characterizes bilingual children whose age of first exposure to L2 was between 1 and 4 years as early sequential bilinguals (Blom et al. 2017; Meisel 2009). The early sequential bilinguals are different from simultaneous bilinguals by the sequence of L2 acquisition and some grammatical knowledge acquisition in L1 before L2 (Montrul 2008). In immigrant families, the children's exposure to L2 (the dominant language of the host society) frequently occurs only after entering a preschool educational setting. In this case, the heritage or minority language is acquired first (Boerma et al. 2017; Polinsky 2018; Rothweiler et al. 2017). The acquisition of grammar in L1/L2 by early sequential bilinguals has not yet been investigated sufficiently (e. g., Unsworth, Hulk 2009). The present study seeks to extend the knowledge on acquisition of L1 grammar by early sequential bilinguals.
Materials
We conducted a semi-structured elicitation test, which involved verbal and visual stimuli. The task included 35 stimuli. The largest number of items (n = 14) included nouns which require regular pluralization, i. e., ending -y/-i, with no changing of the stem. These forms are acquired by monolingual children by the age of four. The second large group of items (n = 13) comprised words which are pluralized with relocation of the stress. Five additional groups of items were nouns with suppletive plural forms, pluralia tantum nouns, nouns undergoing vowel reduction, nouns getting suffix -j, and nouns getting suffix -jat in plural forms. These ways of pluralization are relatively rare; nevertheless, they relate to frequent nouns in children's input and output. Thus, these groups were represented by 2-3 nouns each. It is important to note that many words relate to more than one group (see Table 1). The specific words were chosen in such a way that they could both reflect the acquisition of the plural system basics and provide a wide spectrum of potential errors.
Table 1. Structure of the noun pluralization test
pluralia tantum nouns masculine nouns feminine nouns neuter nouns
ending in -a/-ja ending in a palatalized consonant with stressed endings with unstressed endings
1. очки, ocki, 'glasses' мяч, mjac, 'ball' кукла, kukla, 'doll' мышь, mys, 'mouse' яйцо, jajzo, 'egg' дерево, derevo, 'tree'
2. ножницы, nozhnicy, 'scissors' стакан, stakan, 'glass' лампа, lampa, 'lamp' цепь, cep', 'chain' окно, okno, 'window' яблоко, jabloko, 'apple'
3. утенок, utenok, duckling девочка, devocka, 'girl' кость, kost', 'bone' ведро, vedro, 'bucket' сердце, serdce, heart
4. барабан, baraban, drum книга, kniga, book карусель, karusel', carousel колесо, koleso, wheel
5. дом, dom, house рука, ruka, hand
6. стул, stul, chair кошка, koska, cat
7. нос, nos, nose машина, masina, car
8. мальчик, malcik, boy
9. осел, osel, donkey
10. человек, celovek, person
11. котенок, kotenok, kitten
12. рот, rot, mouth
13. ребенок, rebenok, child
14. теленок, telenok, calf
15. щенок, scenok, puppy
We followed a number of criteria in our choice of test items. First, all the items we chose were concrete nouns familiar to children; the graphic presentation was clear and neutral. The pictures would be recognizable as the target in all of the cultures in which testing was done. Our second criterion was noun frequency; 10 bilingual preschool teachers and Russian-speaking speech therapists graded the nouns by their frequency in speech. We used the following 4-point scale for the assessment: (1) children use this word often; (2) children use this word sometimes, (3) children seldom use this word; (4) children never use this word. Only frequent words were included in the test. Finally, we pre-tested the remaining items with 15 children, three children in each country. We found that the children understood the instructions and coped with the test. Too difficult items were excluded. Thus, we excluded three collective nouns due to a floor effect (no correct answer was achieved). In addition, we clarified, extended, and simplified the test instructions and replaced some unclear pictures based on the children's questions and comments.
Procedure
Each child was assessed individually in a quiet room at their preschool. The testing session lasted approximately 40 minutes. A native Russian-speaker administered the task. Instructions were given in Russian and included two practice examples.
Participants were shown a booklet containing pairs of pictures. The child was first presented with a picture of a single item (e. g., a doll), and the investigator described the picture in a sentence, for example: 'Vot sidit kukla' 'There is a doll sitting here.' A picture representing a number of the same items was then shown to the child, and the investigator asked: 'And who is sitting here?' The expected answer was the plural form of the noun; for example, kukly 'dolls.' The responses were recorded on a chart by the investigator.
Results
In this section we will present the results of qualitative analysis of errors in the production of noun plural forms in Russian (L1) among bilingual Russian-speaking children and monolingual children. The quantitative analysis follows in the Part 2 of the article.
Qualitative analysis of errors
To address the qualitative comparison of noun plurals between the bilingual and monolingual children, we analyzed the types of errors produced by the children. The analysis revealed no qualitative difference between bilingual and both younger and age-matched monolingual children. We found that the children used the same strategies of noun pluralization and made the same types of errors in all groups and in all language contexts. In the following description, we present only the types of errors produced in our sample.
1. Use of singular instead of plural: the child did not change the initial singular form into plural, e. g., okno 'window' instead of okna 'windows' (it also includes stress shift).
2. Overgeneralization of the ending -y/-iwas found in the following cases:
a. the use of the ending -y/-i instead of the ending -a in neuter or masculine nouns, e. g., *vjodr-y (from vedro 'bucket') instead of vjodr-a 'buckets;'
b. the use of the ending -y/-i instead of suppletive forms, e. g., *chelovek-i (from chelovek 'man') instead of ljud-i 'people;'
c. the use of the ending -y/-i in collective nouns; (e. g., *kartoski, instead of kartoska, 'potatoes.'
3. Stem preservation was found in the following cases:
a. stress preservation: *mjaci (from mjac 'ball') instead of mjaci;
b. no vowel reduction: *scenok-i (from seen'ok 'puppy'.) instead of scenk-i 'puppies;'
c. no addition of the suffix: *stul-y (from stul 'chair') instead of stul-ja 'chairs;'
d. preservation of the suffix -onk/-onok in the names of young animals: *kot'-onk-i (from kot'-onok 'kitten') instead of kot'-jat-a 'kittens.'
4. Use of diminutives: the child produced the plural diminutive form. The plural diminutive form is a derivate of the diminutive singular form. In our sample, the children used diminutive forms of plural even though the stimuli were not diminutives.
5. Use of suppletive forms: the children produced the plural form by adding the plural ending -i to the singular form, while the target form is suppletive, e. g., *rebjonk-i (from rebjonok 'child') instead of deti 'children.'
6. Use of the genitive case instead of the nominative. The children used the noun phrase 'mnogo (a lot of) + genitive plural' instead of the nominative plural, e. g., mnogo stakanov 'a lot of glasses' (from stakan 'glass' instead of stakany 'glasses.' It is worth noting that the noun phrase 'mnogo (a lot of) + genitive plural' is acceptable; therefore, in this case, we are dealing with a strategy rather than with erroneous production.
It is important to note that, in some cases, one single erroneous form was associated with a number of error types. For example, the erroneous form mnogo serdeeek 'a lot of hearts' was associated with two types of deviations: the use of the genitive case instead of the nominative and the use of the diminutive form.
Qualitative analysis of children's performance
Our first goal was to determine whether or not bilingual Russian-speaking children acquire a pattern of pluralization in Russian (L1) differently than their monolingual Russian-speaking counterparts. As predicted, we found that the patterns of acquisition of noun pluralization are similar for monolingual and bilingual children. All children in our study made the same types of developmental errors. This pattern of data is convergent with results obtained earlier among sequential bilingual children.
In addition, the qualitative analysis of our data showed two intriguing aspects in noun plural production. First, we found that in the context of structured testing this error appears among bilingual as well as monolingual children even at ages 4-5. However, the existing data on noun plural production in the natural speech of the Russian monolingual children shows that the use of singular instead of plural normally disappears during the first few months after the spurt in the number oppositions in the speech, approximately by age 2 (Gvozdev 2007; Tsejtlin 2009). One possible explanation could be that in spontaneous speech children have the opportunity to avoid word forms and grammatical constructions that they might find challenging. An alternative explanation might be that a word in spontaneous speech usually does not appear "in a vacuum" within the context, but appears together with a verb or a pronoun, e. g., эти гуси 'these geese.' In this case, the neighboring lexemes may facilitate the choice of the correct morphological form. Further research is needed to find an explanation for the gap between the elicited and the spontaneous speech.
Second, we found that the children in our study used pluralization strategies such as diminutives and the construction mnogo 'a lot of' + genitive. It is noteworthy that these constructions are grammatically correct and acceptable. We presume that the use of these strategies was not a result of misunderstanding, since no child used genitive plural or diminutives for all of the target nouns. Mostly, the children used these strategies in the cases of difficult derivational plural forms. For example, pluralization ofpluralia tantum nouns is normally acquired by the age of 7-8 in monolingual acquisition; consequently, it was difficult for the children of our sample. To convey the pluralization of the collective pluralia tantum noun ochki 'glasses,' the children in our sample
largely used the construction mnogo 'a lot of' + genitive. The result could be grammatically correct (e. g., mnogo ochkov 'a lot of glasses') as well as grammatically incorrect forms (e. g., mnogo ochok* 'a lot of glasses'). However, since in this study the child was asked to name the object so that she/ he would produce the noun plural form in the nominative case, the usage of this strategy was considered undesirable.
Similarly, the use of diminutives made the construction of plural forms somewhat easier. The children in our sample had difficulty with both the change of the word stem and the change of the stress. Since the stem and the stress of diminutive forms in Russian remain constant for singular and plural forms, the use of the diminutive plural form allows the child to avoid grammatically difficult constructions. It is noteworthy that the plural diminutive form alone is correct. However, it is a derivate of a diminutive singular form. Thus, knizhk-i is a correctly formed word, but it is the plural of the diminutive form knizhk-a 'little book' rather than the regular form knig-a 'book.' In our sample, the children frequently used diminutive plural forms even though the stimuli were not diminutives.
One of the most intriguing questions of our study addressed the role of the grammar context of L2 in the acquisition of the grammatical category in L1. We asked whether the presence of a grammar category per se in L2 is important for its acquisition in L1, or whether this factor is insufficient and we also need to consider the degree of complexity of the category in L2 compared to L1. As was reported above, this study was part of a larger research project which aimed to examine the role of diverse L2 backgrounds (Finnish, German, Hebrew, and English) in acquisition of core grammar in Russian as L1. The first study of this project showed a clear-cut effect of L2 background on (L1) Russian gender agreement acquisition: The presence and the relative proximity of a grammar category in both languages spoken by a bilingual child facilitated category acquisition. Thus, in terms of gender agreement, the bilingual children whose L2 has grammatical gender (German, Hebrew) outperformed the bilinguals whose L2 does not have grammatical gender (Finnish, English), indicating that the presence of a grammatical category in both languages spoken by a bilingual facilitates category acquisition. However, the present study investigated the grammatical category, noun pluralization, which exists in all the L2s under consideration. Our study indicated that the children with different L2 backgrounds showed mostly similar results in terms of Russian pluralization, while the performance of bilingual children was comparable with the performance of age-matched monolinguals. These results may indicate that the presence of a grammar category in L2 plays a central role in the acquisition of this category in L1. In light of these results, the role of the degree of complexity of the target category in L2 seems to be less crucial.
Our results also showed some interesting intergroup differences with regard to the specific categories of errors. First, the smallest number of errors in the use of the genitive instead of the nominative case was shown among the children with German L2. The possible linguistic explanation for this finding is that the construction viele + plural 'a lot of' in German is associated with the nominative and not with the genitive case. In this context, it is noteworthy that the children with Finnish L2 performed less well than other groups on the use of the genitive instead of the nominative case. Namely, they produced the construction mnogo 'a lot of' + genitive relatively frequently. This finding could be attributed to the fact that the noun plural is often conveyed through the partitive case in Finnish, which coincides with the genitive in Russian.
Finally, the children with Finnish L2 showed the best results in the use of the suffix -yat used to form plurals for young animals. We can presume that children could associate this suffix with the Finnish plural suffix -t, which facilitated the acquisition of the suffix -yat. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that the children at the Finnish preschool had received better teaching about names of young animals.
Discussion and conclusions
The goal of the present study was to compare the pattern of noun pluralization in Russian (L1) among monolingual and bilingual (L1) Russian-speaking children and to examine the possible role of L2 background in production of noun plurals in Russian (L1). Two main conclusions were deduced. First, no qualitative difference was found between the groups in noun pluralization, i. e., all children in our study made the same types of developmental errors. Second, our results may indicate that some minor negative influence was evident nevertheless in the case of the children with English L2, which is characterized by most regular noun pluralization, and hence the presence of a grammar category in L2 plays the central role in the acquisition of this category in L1. Since all the L2s under consideration have grammatical number, it seems that the role of linguistic typology of L2 is less significant.
The paper considers children whose L2 was acquired as early as 2 or 3 years of age. They are certainly sequential bilinguals, but it is clear that their two languages are still developing. The fact that they lag behind their monolingual peers and that they show different results in different domains of morphology explain the qualitative differences.
These results represent the next step in our investigation of the acquisition patterns of Russian inflectional noun morphology by bilingual children with diverse L2 backgrounds. Similar to the first study (Schwartz et al. 2015) focused on gender agreement, the present study showed the same pattern of acquisition of morphological category among monolinguals and bilinguals with different L2s. At the same time, the comparison of the results of the two studies shows that the presence or absence of the target grammar category is more crucial for its acquisition than its characteristics, such as regularity. Thus, as in the case of grammatical gender, the presence of this category per se in the children's L2 — Hebrew and German versus Finnish and English — was a critical factor in its acquisition in Russian (L1). In the same vein, in the case of noun pluralization, the presence of the category in each target second language was a more important factor influencing its acquisition among (L1) Russian-speaking bilinguals than the relative degree of its complexity.
This study has a number of limitations. First, our focus was on linguistic characteristics of the target second languages and their role in the child's L1 production. Thus, the question of in depth examination of a possible link between qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the L1/L2 input and children's L1 production was beyond the scope of this study. Language environment has been suggested as one of the major factors in linguistic development in both monolingual (Lieven, Tomasello 2008) and bilingual contexts (Hulk, Cornips 2006).
In addition, further longitudinal research is required to examine whether our bilingual children will still show qualitative similarities in their patterns of noun pluralization around age 9-10, which were found to be the ages of ultimate attainment of noun pluralization for the monolingual children in Russian (Ceytlin 2009).
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Victor Moin (University of Haifa, Israel) for his help with statistics.
Conflict of interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest, either existing or potential.
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