Studies in phonological development usually focus on the acquisition of separate segments and the quality of their realization, while much less is still known about the development of whole-word patterns. The analysis of the wholeword structure, or word shape, addresses word structure patterns (WSPs) that are mastered and constantly used by children in their speech. The aim of the current study was to analyze the distribution of syllable and WSPs in the corpus of Russian typically-developing children’s discourse. The study was based on the corpus data (orthographically transcribed texts) of Russian-speaking monolingual children (n = 14; the mean age was ~68 months). The data included 28 fictional narratives and 14 conversational reasoning dialogues between a child and an experimenter. By means of specially designed software the PASTA, words were structurally analyzed and classified into 22 groups according to the basic types of syllable structure of a Russian word. Then, the percentage distribution of these structures was estimated. Statistical analysis revealed that the distribution of syllable types was quite similar between the children and adult speech data; in children, this measure did not depend on the discourse genre (narrative vs. conversational reasoning dialogue). The WSPs distribution, in contrary, discriminated children from adults and was significantly influenced by the discourse genre.

Despite the increasing number of studies on the specifics of Lithuanian spoken by expats, there’s still a lack of more extensive, large-scale research on the peculiarities of the Lithuanian language obtained in an environment where a different language is spoken. To that end, we conducted a study aimed at identifying the lexical and grammatical features of the Lithuanian language as they’re acquired in an English-speaking environment. The material was collected in four Lithuanian language schools based in London from 100 children aged 4-9. All of the children lived in London and attended private Lithuanian schools (~3-6 hours per week), learned their native language from their parents, were born in the United Kingdom, or moved there at the age of 1. During the experiment, the participants were asked to produce a narrative using a set of six pictures (Hickmann 2003; Gagarina et al. 2012). The narratives were recorded using a voice recorder, transcribed and morphologically annotated for an automatic analysis of narrative language using CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000) software. This study is the first to focus on the native language of children living in a bilingual environment, its productivity, lexical diversity, morphology, and syntax. The present article discusses several grammatical aspects of the Lithuanian language acquired as the mother tongue in an English-speaking environment – changes in inflection, as well as differential object marking, coordination and control, which often cause difficulties to children. An analysis of the material showed that the Lithuanian language inflection system of bilingual children can be acquired appropriately, regardless of the fact that in some children, the process may take as many as five or six years. Both younger and older children tend to simplify inflection, which leads them to inflect non-productive paradigm or less usual nouns in accordance with productive paradigms.[...]

The paper deals with micro- and macrostructural static and dynamic narrative characteristics in specifically language-impaired (SLI) Russian-speaking preschool children and their typically-developing (TD) peers. The study was based on experimental data that included storytelling and retelling elicited by means of wordless picture sequences. First, individual measures of story structure, episode completeness, internal state terms, story productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity, as well as the percentage of linguistic dysfluencies and errors, were evaluated and compared between the experimental and control groups. Second, the impact of such factors as session (1st vs. 2nd), story complexity, and mode (telling vs. retelling) on the dynamic variation of micro- and macrostructural narrative measures was evaluated. Our results highlighted essential dynamic differences between the samples from the perspective of narrative structure, structural complexity, grammaticality, and vocabulary.