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Natalia RingblomResearcher

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Holistic Constructions in Heritage Russian and Russian as a Second Language

    2019. Natalia Ringblom, Galina Dobrova. Scando-Slavica 65 (1), 94-106

    Article

    The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the strategies applied by young learners of Russian when naming a word in a vocabulary test. A total of 40 children took part in the experiment: 10 simultaneous Russian-Swedish bilingual children and 10 successive Russian-Swedish bilinguals who lived in Sweden, 10 children who moved to Russia and acquired Russian as a second language, and 10 monolingual Russian children living in Russia (as a control group). All the children were tested with the Russian version of Cross-Linguistic Tasks (CLT; Nenonen, Gagarina 2016). The results showed that the error pattern in all the groups of children seemed to be similar; yet, the acquisition of some structures appeared to be delayed in Russian Heritage Language (HL) children. Holistic constructions are common for all the children, but in bilingual children the effects of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) were also noticed. We argue that 'atypical' construction does not necessarily need to be disordered since the two languages of the HL child develop in contact with each other. However, a pattern of delayed acquisition can later lead to divergent development in the weaker language of bilingual children.

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  • Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages

    2017. Ewa Haman (et al.).

    Other

    This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.

    Read more about Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages

  • Diversity, language maintenance and intergenerational transmission

    2016. Sviatlana Karpava, Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Natalia Ringblom. 2nd Whole Action Conference, 12-14 May 2016, Universität Hamburg

    Conference

    This study investigates Russian-language maintenance and transmission, and the social and cultural identities of Russian-speaking female informants in multilingual settings in Cyprus, Estonia and Sweden. The relationship between language and identity depends on socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural factors (Pavlenko and Blackledge 2003). We plan to investigate the linguistic and sociolinguistic profiles of immigrant and minority communities in the three countries. In particular, our research is focused on the home languages of the members of these communities, and whether Russian as an L1 is maintained and transferred to the second and third generations. Written questionnaires were used for data collection among Russian-speaking mothers, of which 27 currently reside in Cyprus, 11 live in Estonia and 15 in Sweden. In Cyprus, as well as in Sweden, Russian is spoken by a small minority group – immigrants or members of mixed marriage families – and may come under threat of extinction in the future in this host country. In Estonia, Russian is a minority language, the former sociolinguistically dominant language, and still used as the L1 among almost one-third of the country’s population. In Sweden, Russian is more a migrant language, mainly used in interethnic marriages. Language transmits culture and history, and thus language loss can lead to the loss of inherited knowledge. Linguistic diversity is as important as ecological diversity (Crystal 2000; Krauss 1992). Language vitality depends on such factors as demography, status, prestige, institutional control, and the ethnolinguistic group, its distribution and size (Giles et al 1977). In our study, we aim to look into the factors that influence minority/immigrant language transmission, among them motivation (integrative/intrinsic motivation), the symbolic role of a language, minority identities, socio-economic status, social networks, religion, the tendency toward social segregation or inclusion, language solidarity (García, 2003), attitudes and valences (Woolard, 1998; Wölck, 2004; Lasagabaster and Huguet, 2007), the environment of the speaker and the value of bilingualism and multilingualism in particular environments (family, school, society and individual) (García, 2009), the use of the minority language in public (Wölck, 2004) and its utility (Grin and Vaillancourt, 1997; Henley and Jones, 2005), and the cultural value of the language (Woolard and Shieffelin, 1994) and its utility (Wölck, 2005). We believe that our study will show that Russian-speaking mothers get stuck on the one-parent, one-language strategy when using languages at home. Multilingualism and the maintenance of the Russian language and culture among children are usually encouraged.

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  • Family language policy in Sweden, Cyprus and Estonia

    2016. Natalia Ringblom, Sviatlana Karpava, Anastassia Zabrodskaja. Bilingual Child Migrants in a Multilingual Europe

    Conference

    Drawing on theories offamily language policy (FLP), our study investigates Russian-language maintenance and transmission, and the social and cultural identities of Russian-speaking informants in the multilingual settings of Sweden, Cyprus and Estonia. We investigate the home languages of the members of these communities, and whether Russian as an L1 is maintained and transferred to the second generation. Family language policy in multilingual, transcultural families, parental expectations and strategies to construct safe spaces of language transmission, challenges and support through such institutions as kindergartens and schools, agents of normalization (Purkarthofer and Muni Toke, 2016; Busch, 2012; 2016), language and social spaces, as well as manifold linguistic repertoires of heteroglossic acquisition for multilingual competence and practices are under investigation (Tuan, 1977; Lefebvre, 1991; Giroux, 1992; Massey, 2005; Canagarajah, 2013). Using parental written questionnaires with the focus on general background, socio-economic status and language proficiency (Otwinowska & Karpava, 2015), as well as oral semi-structured interviews (Ringblom, Zabrodskaja, Karpava 2015), our study attempts to describe how FLP is managed through literacy activities in 53 multilingual families in three different cultural and linguistic environments. Our results show both differences and similarities among Russian-speakers in the three countries, not only in their family language practices, but also in their attitudes towards Russian-language literacy. Multilingualism and the maintenance of the Russian language and culture are usually encouraged and parents often choose the OPOL approach at home. However, not all of the efforts result in successful home language transmission.

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  • Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages

    2016. Magdalena Łuniewska, Natalia Ringblom, Özlem Ünal-Logacev. Behavior Research Methods 48 (3), 1154-1177

    Article

    We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters’ social or language status, but not with the raters’ age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.

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  • Russian Language Transmission and Loss in the Baltic Countries, Sweden and Cyprus

    2016. Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Natalia Ringblom, Sviatlana Karpava. Sociolinguistic Sympusium 21

    Conference

    Language attitudes of adult speakers towards their heritage language, its intergenerational transmission and maintenance are often considered to be the major contributors to the linguistic outcome of their children. The ethnolinguistic vitality model proposed by Giles, Bourhis & Taylor (1977) takes into account variables that may contribute to the influence on the maintenance or loss of the homelanguage. Such factors as social networks have also been reported to be responsible for the high or low maintenance of a specific speech variety (Milroy & Wei, 2005). Clearly defined transmission strategies are associated with success, where the most effective one is the one parent –one language strategy, which has been confirmed by several studies. Parental language choice is definitely one of the main factors contributing to successful transmission. However, children's language choices also influence the language choices of their parents, which in turn may change the language patterns among the parents. The parents often switch to the majority language to accommodate the language choices of their children. The question is how this will influence parental attitudes towards bilingual upbringing and language transmission to the second generation. Individuals change their minds and attitudes, which is reflected in the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957). They try to reduce tension produced by any inconsistency. People do this by changing the inconsistent cognition and they look for additional evidence to prefer one choice over another, often laying the blame on the child who ―refuses to speak some particular language. This paper discusses the attitudes towards the Russian language transmission of 25 Russian-speaking mothers living in Baltic countries, Sweden and Cyprus, and how these attitudes changed over time. Particular attention will be paid to similarities and differences in the three populations under investigation. What they have in common is their L1 Russian background and the minority status of their native language. In Cyprus and Sweden, they mainly come from immigrant and mixed-marriage communities, while in Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania they live in a bilingual society, where Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian is a prestigious language and Russian has a low status. Our data was collected with the help of narrative interviews and questionnaires. It represents different kinds of family types: exogamous couples, endogamous couples, blended families and single parents. Our results indicate that success in language transmission is not predicted by the family type. On the other hand, the attitudes towards bilingualism and Russian language transmission (including the change of these attitudes over the years) -depending on the parents' success in bringing up children bilingually -seemed to matter. A lot depends on whether there is a tendency for integration with the dominant language community, for staying isolated and only preserving the home language or for having a balanced bilingual/multilingual approach and positive attitude towards both majority and minority languages. The socio-economic status, level of education and mother‘s employability may play crucial roles in language transmission and attitudes. The linguistic repertoire of the father (minority, majority or mixed) also has an effect.

    Read more about Russian Language Transmission and Loss in the Baltic Countries, Sweden and Cyprus

  • How young bilingual children learn to separate their two languages

    2014. Natalia Ringblom. Материалы 2-й Международной научно-практической конференции Социально-психологическая адаптация мигрантов в современном мире, 204-215

    Conference
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  • Психолiнгвiстика в сучасному свiтi - 2014 [Psycholinguistics in a Modern World - 2014]

    2014. L. O. Kalmykova (et al.).

    Conference

    Annual Scientifiс Conference «Psycholinguistics in the modern world», maintains the tradition of the national scientifiс psycholinguistics based by O.O. Potebnia, L.S. Vygotskyi, O.R. Luria, О.M. Leontiev, М.I. Zhynkin, О.O. Leontiev and other prominent linguists and psychologists, develop existing approaches to the research of psycholinguistic phenomena, offers new perspectives on the phenomenon of human language and speech and presents the latest results of psycholinguistic researches.

    Proceedings are published in Ukrainian, Russian and English and distributed in thei collection of the sections stated in the conference program according to the psychological, linguisticand socio-communicative aspects of psycholinguistics. These aspects are related to common speech - language object of study of the related disciplines: «Psychology», «Linguistics», «Social communication».

    The book presents the scientifiс works of higher school faculty members, researchers, doctoral students, post graduate students, graduate students, and undergraduates - representatives of Ukraine. Russia, Latvia, Germany, Sweden.

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  • The Acquisition of Russian in a Language Contact Situation

    2012. Natalia Ringblom (et al.).

    Thesis (Doc)

    This case study investigates the acquisition of Russian in a language contact situation. It examines a simultaneous Swedish-Russian bilingual child born and raised in Sweden. Qualitative analysis is provided from age 1;4 to 8;5 focusing especially on the earliest stages (before the end of the critical period at 4;5). The aim was to investigate (a) whether the child reaches the same milestones as monolingual children, (b) whether there is evidence that two separate linguistic systems have been developed, (c) whether the child’s grammatical competence in both languages might be qualitatively different from that of monolingual children and (d) whether there is interaction between the languages. The hypothesis tested is that ample input is needed to construct and develop two linguistic systems on a native-speaker level.

    The main result is that the two linguistic systems do not develop independently from each other; rather, 2L1s develop in permanent interaction where the weaker language – Russian – happens to be influenced by the stronger one – Swedish. The bilingual environment per se might lead to decreased structural complexity in the weaker language. Language dominance is viewed as a major determiner of cross-linguistic effects. This could lead to the development of a new individual variety of Russian (outside Russia).  

    The results confirm the hypothesis that, even though there was exposure to both languages from birth onwards, the amount of input in the weaker and grammatically more complex language (Russian) received before the cri­tical period was not enough to completely develop full native command of it. The lack of input has an impact on the acquisition of morphology: some morphological categories may have been set randomly or not at all. The structures observed are more ty­pical of L2 than L1 ac­quisition. Morphology may be considered a vulnerable domain since complex mor­phological rules in Russian cannot develop with­out ample input.

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