Production of pronoun gender by children acquiring Russian as a minority language: Comparison with the effects of developmental language disorder

Abstract

This paper studies the acquisition of Russian pronominal gender by Dutch-Russian si-multaneous bilinguals (4;3-7;11) growing up in the Netherlands. The performance ofthe bilingual group is compared to that of age-matched monolinguals with and with-out developmental language disorder (DLD). We hypothesize that reduced exposure toRussian in the minority-language context may lead to delays in language development,comparabletoproblemsattestedinDLD(inthiscaseduetoreducedintake). Theresultsof a narrative elicitation task demonstrate that both monolingual groups performed atceiling from age 4 onwards. Monolingual children with DLD were as accurate at usingpronominalgenderastheirunimpairedpeersfromtheearliestagesstudied, whichsup-ports the processing accounts of DLD taking morphological richness of the target lan-guage into account. In contrast, 4-year-old bilinguals performed around chance level.The performance of the bilingual group improved with age and reached the monolin-gual level only by age 7. The results suggest that reduced input has more impact on theacquisition of gender in a morphologically rich language, whereas the possible effectsof DLD are no longer visible after age 3.