Titel der Dissertation: Processing of morphosyntactic structures in heritage speakers of Russian in Germany: a psycholinguistic study

Abstract:

Heritage speakers of Russian in Germany form a heterogeneous group with highly variable Russian language skills, influenced by the linguistic environment and family input. While daily life outside the family predominantly takes place in German, Russian is mainly used within the family.

The research project investigates the processing of morphosyntactic structures in Russian by heritage speakers using electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potential (ERP) analysis. EEG data will be collected during the processing of auditory stimuli that include morphosyntactic structures consistent with Russian norms as well as structures that deviate from these norms but are commonly found among heritage speakers.

The aim of the study is to investigate the morphosyntactic processing of heritage speakers in Germany and to compare them with monolingual Russian speakers. One question is whether heritage speakers can make use of the morphosyntactic structures of Russian to the same extent as L1 speakers. Another question is how morphosyntactic transfer phenomena from German are processed. The study combines aspects of heritage language research, morphosyntax, and psycholinguistics in order to gain deeper insights into bilingual language processing.