Language Acquisition : Full and Incomplete Scenarios

The overall rich body of literature dealing with first language acquisition has been concerned, to a very large extent, with the unpacking of the notion “acquisition” into a set of simpler, smaller notions. This unpacking should eventually lead us to understanding smaller problems and hopefully, eventually build into the larger picture of language acquisition altogether. In this brief survey, I will try to follow the same pattern and show all the complexities of language acquisition. I see my goal here as twofold: first, to do justice to the recent work on the acquisition of Russian by highlighting the major achievements and emphasizing the main points, second, to ask the pertinent questions as to what work needs to be done next. It would be impossible to ask these questions without the work that has already been done. The recognition of the findings that are already available to us thus constitutes an important step into future research. I invite the reader to rise above theoretical and ideological differences between frameworks which often drive a lot of linguistic research—after all, we are all together in our pursuit of the mystery of “effortless” L1 learning. For a long time, there was very little connection between the “practical” acquisition studies and the theoretical approaches to child language. The Russian-language literature on L1 acquisition covers a rich and wide range of descriptive topics with little or no interest in the pros and cons of nativism, socialization theory, or connectionist theory of acquisition. The main emphasis of the Russian literature on acquisition has been on two major aspects of acquisition: developmental stages in the acquisition of morphological and syntactic patterns, and pedagogical recommendations for speech pathology and speech errors. Due to that, the Russian outlook on acquisition has always been characterized by the emphasis on smaller notions without a desire to achieve a more global picture and/or to construct a general acquisitional theory. A much more sparse body of work dealing with theoretical aspects of the acquisition of Russian is represented by the recent work done mostly in the US. In what follows, I will review some of the major works dealing with the empirical base of acquisition of Russian. In presenting an overview of syntactic aspects of acquisition, I will also go over major theoretical results achieved on the basis of experimental evidence. I will then present a comparison between complete and incomplete acquisition scenarios and I will conclude with some projections for the future research.