Acquisition of Russian: Uninterrupted and Incomplete Scenarios

The 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, in leading us to a better understanding of smaller problems, will hopefully eventually be followed by a recombination of the puzzle pieces so as to enrich the larger picture of language acquisition. In this brief survey, I will follow the same path for Russian and try to do justice to all the complexities of language acquisition. I see my goal here as twofold: first, to acknowledge the existing work on the acquisition of Russian, highlighting its major achievements and emphasizing its main points; second, to ask the pertinent questions as to what needs to be done next. It would be impossible to ask these questions without the work that has already been accomplished, and the acknowledgment of the findings that are already available to us thus constitutes an important step towards future research. I invite the reader to rise above the theoretical and ideological differences between frameworks which often drive much of linguistic research—after all, we are all united in our pursuit of the mystery of “effortless” L1 learning. For a long time, there was very little connection between “practical” acquisition studies and 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 the connectionist theory of acquisition. The main emphasis in 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. Because of this, the Russian outlook on acquisition has always been characterized by an emphasis on smaller