Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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Quantifier scope in Russian as a heritage or a second language

This talk examines how both heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian interpret scopally ambiguous Russian sentences, the equivalents of English sentences such as “One girl stroked every kitten” or “Every girl stroked one kitten.” In English, such sentences are fully ambiguous between surface-scope and inverse-scope readings. In Russian, the availability of the inverse-scope reading is subject to debate; in prior work with monolingual Russian speakers, we have found that the availability of the inverse-scope reading is affected by word order (canonical vs. scrambled) as well as prosody (neutral vs. contrastive). In the present study, we ask whether heritage Russian speakers are sensitive to the constraints on Russian quantifier scope, and whether they pattern more with monolingual Russian speakers or with second language learners. Our findings provide suggestive evidence that heritage speakers with high proficiency in Russian are sensitive to the role of word order, but not the role of prosody. We discuss the relevance of both input and age of acquisition to the interpretation of Russian quantifier scope.