Encoding of motion events in the two languages of Russian-English bilinguals

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine the encoding of motion in the two languages of Russian-English bilinguals who differed in their ages of arrival in the United States. Three groups of participants took part in the study: 38 L1 Russian speakers, 31 L1 English speakers and 30 Russian-English bilinguals who differed in the ages of arrival in the US (10 early, 10 childhood, and 10 late bilinguals). The participants produced oral narratives elicited with two books, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) and One Frog Too Many (Mayer & Mayer, 1975), with bilingual participants producing narratives in both of their languages. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data revealed several differences between L1 Russian and English speakers, including the obligatory encoding of manner of motion in Russian but not in English, where narrators also used generic motion verbs, such as to come or to go. In the context of these differences bilinguals in all three groups were shown to perform in accordance with specific language constraints in both of their languages. At the same time, Russian-English bilinguals used fewer motion verbs in L1 Russian and displayed lower levels of lexical diversity than L1 Russian speakers. The analyses revealed no effects of the age of arrival on the maintenance of L1 Russian, nor of the L1 Russian on the motion talk in L2 English. The findings of the study deepen our understanding of motion encoding in bilingual speakers. They also have important theoretical implications, suggesting that Talmy's dichotomy may be too broad in grouping together languages, such as Russian and English, which display dramatic differences in encoding of motion.