Об усвоении приставочных глаголов движения при детском русско-итальянском билингвизме (Ob usvoenii pristavočnych glagolov dviženija pri detskom russko-ital'janskom bilingvizme)

The article analyses data from an ad hoc test conducted with students attending Saturday Russian schools in the Italian region of Lombardy. The test checked their proficiency in Russian verbs of motion with prefixes denoting direction. These Russian verbs possess a number of lexical and grammatical features that cause significant difficulty to non-standard speakers. The purpose of the test was to discover and
explore erroneous strategies used regarding Russian verbs of motion in RussianItalian bilingual situations, when Italian is the dominant, and Russian the heritage language. The analysis of the results enabled us to establish a correlation between the recurrent systemic errors of those tested and input parameters such as: 1) early vs late bilingualism and 2) bilingual vs monolingual family. The main strategies employed by these bilingual children when using verbs to indicate type and direction of motiont include transfer, simplification, substitution and over-generalization. The results of the study can be used in language teaching for the correction of the errors identified.