Strategies of comprehending motivated Russian vocabulary by monolingual and bilingual children of Northern Kazakhstan: an experimental study

The research presents the experimental study of children’s speech in the aspect of lexical theory of motivation. It considers the strategies of comprehending Russian motivated vocabulary by 5-10-year-old monolinguals and bilinguals from Northern Kazakhstan. The relevance is due to the necessity to study children’s motivational language awareness (their ability to find connections between sound form and meaning) essential for developing child’s linguistic-cognitive thinking, efficient communication. The research aims at identifying and describing strategies of comprehending Russian vocabulary by monolingual and bilingual children using psycholinguistic experimental findings, and at analyzing the strategies taking into account children’s age and proficiency in one or two languages (Russian / Russian and Kazakh). The research material comprises 1440 children’s meta-statements or verbal reactions regarding their awareness about the word motivation. During the experiment, psycholinguistic, descriptive, and comparative-motivological methods were used. As a result, 12 strategies were described reflecting peculiarities of children’s comprehension and interpretation of motivated words. Common and specific features in implementing strategies by respondents were also identified. The generality is proved, which consists in the fact that meta-statements of monolingual and bilingual children aged 5-6, 7-8, 9-10 years are remarkable for the dynamics in motivational language-awareness development, as evidenced by the frequency of using language-oriented strategies (strategies 1, 2, 3). The difference is that 1) when comprehending Russian words, monolinguals gave more productive answers; their strategies were less diverse, and their meta-statements had a tendency towards one correct answer; 2) Russian-Kazakh bilinguals used various comprehension strategies, read the internal form of the Russian word less accurately, focused attention on individual segments of the word, mixed lexical units with similar sound forms in two languages, and created occasional word meanings. The obtained data can be useful for further studies of children’s speech and teaching Russian in monolingual and bilingual environment.