Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew

Abstract The present study investigates the impact of heritage language (HL) properties on the acquisition of definiteness marking in the societal language (SL), Hebrew, among two groups of HL speakers: HL-English and HL-Russian. Hebrew, English, and Russian differ in their definiteness encoding: Hebrew uses the definite article ha- exclusively for definite nouns, leaving indefinite noun phrases unmarked; English marks both definite and indefinite nouns; Russian lacks articles in its grammatical system. Using a narrative production task, four groups are compared: (i) monolingual Hebrew-speaking adults, (ii) monolingual Hebrew-speaking children, (iii) HL-English/SL-Hebrew bilingual children, and (iv) HL-Russian/SL-Hebrew bilingual children. Results show that the monolingual children exhibit adultlike patterns of definiteness use. Further pairwise comparisons indicate that when controlling for morphosyntactic abilities, the HL-English group resembles the monolingual Hebrew-speaking children, while the HL-Russian group lags behind. Detailed error pattern analyses reveal that the HL-Russian speakers are more likely to omit definite articles compared to the Hebrew-speaking monolinguals and the HL-English bilinguals. To conclude, the study provides evidence for the effects of crosslinguistic influence on SL article acquisition, showing that Hebrew definiteness acquisition is shaped by HL properties, corroborating previous findings.