Gina Peirce (Pitt Linguistics MA, 2015) published an article in Heritage Language Journal 15:1 (April 2018), titled “Representational and Processing Constraints on the Acquisition of Case and Gender by Heritage and L2 Learners of Russian: A Corpus Study.” Her study used the Russian Learner Corpus of Academic Writing to compare morphological error frequencies in timed versus untimed essays written by advanced heritage and L2 learners in Portland State University’s Russian Language Flagship program. The heritage group had lower overall case and gender-marking error rates, and they also made more errors in their timed than their untimed texts (unlike the L2 group), suggesting that heritage learners are less likely to show evidence of possible representational deficits of nominal functional features in their interlanguage grammar.
Gina works at the University of Pittsburgh as Assistant Director for Grants and Assessment, Center for Russian and East European Studies (REES) and Grants Manager, University Center for International Studies (UCIS).