Near-native speakers (heritage speakers and adult second language learners alike) experience difficulty in interpreting and producing linguistic constructions that contain morphologically null elements. We dub this phenomenon the Silent Problem. The bulk of literature on the Silent Problem in near-native speakers has concentrated on the identification and interpretation of null pronominals. In this paper we expand our understanding of the Silent Problem in three ways. First, we show that the range of the problem extends well beyond the grammar of null pronominals. Second, we argue that the various manifestations of the Silent Problem all follow from a typical aspect of near-native grammars: difficulty in recovering missing elements that have discourse antecedents. Third, although heritage and second language speakers show similar difficulties in the recovery of discourse-licensed silent elements, the two speaker populations differ in their evaluation of zero-marked forms in contrastive contexts. We account for this difference by the fact that heritage speakers differ from second language speakers in the comprehension of contrastive material. This comprehension requires good control of the interface between syntax and information structure (including prosodic knowledge), and heritage speakers have an advantage over second language learners in that area.

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.

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The study’s main objective is to investigate the effects of information structure and verb type on the acceptability of canonical and non-canonical word order patterns in baseline, heritage, and L2 Russian in a controlled experimental setting. In particular, the study examines the bilinguals’ sensitivity to extralinguistic (subject focus) and intralinguistic (unaccusativity) triggers of subject–verb inversion in Russian. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs a contextualized acceptability judgment task with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive predicates. In each condition, ratings for SV(O) and (O)VS structures are elicited in broad-focus and narrow-subject-focus contexts. Data and analysis: Data come from adult English-Russian bilinguals: heritage speakers at two proficiency levels ( n = 27) and L2 learners ( n = 15), compared to monolingual Russian speakers ( n = 15). Welch’s unequal variances t-tests are utilized in the statistical analysis of the results. Findings/conclusions: Bilinguals generally under-accept inverted structures. With intransitive predicates, heritage speakers in the higher proficiency group are sensitive to the effects of unaccusativity, but not focus, on the occurrence of VS orders. However, with transitive predicates, higher proficiency heritage speakers demonstrate a target-like contrast in their ratings of OVS structures under broad and narrow focus. No clear effects of unaccusativity or focus are attested in the lower proficiency heritage or L2 speakers’ judgments of inverted orders. Originality: This is the first study to compare the effects of unaccusativity and focus on word order variation in baseline, heritage, and L2 Russian and to examine subject focus in both intransitive and transitive structures. Significance/Implications: The differential effects of subject focus obtained in the intransitive and transitive conditions indicate that heritage speakers do not experience a generalized difficulty with information-structure marking through word order. While intralinguistic word order cues seem more accessible to early bilinguals than extralinguistic cues, heritage speakers are able to attend to the latter when their visibility is enhanced in discourse.

"Heritage Language Complexity Matters: The Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue" published on 10 Nov 2021 by Brill.

Research on Russian as a heritage language has played a central role in the development of heritage language studies