The Role of Input Factors in the Development of Verbal Aspect in Heritage Russian: a Case-study of Narratives Produced by Bilingual Children Aged 5-7

This paper describes and analyses the role of input factors in the development of verbal aspect in heritage Russian. The three research questions posed were: (i) whether there is a difference in the aspectual usage between different groups of bilinguals, (ii) do input factors significantly influence the acquisition of verbal aspect (and how) (iii) do the general claims of the Aspectual and Distributional Bias Hypotheses hold with the data. We handled the questions through analyzing 57 narratives of bilingual children aged 5 to 7. Our analyses show that bilinguals more perfective than imperfective in the past tense, showing congruence with Aspectual and Distributional Bias Hypotheses, and there is a strong correlation between family type and aspectual choice, children from families with two Russian-speaking parents show more monolingual-like patterns in the choice of tense and aspect. It remains to be seen whether these findings can be supported by the data from bilingual narratives of children with other dominant languages. Keywords: bilingualism, narratives, aspect, acquisition