Scholarship and Biography
I grew up in the far northeast of Russia at the time when it was part of the USSR. I received education both in Russia and the U.S., having studied English and German philology in Magadan, Russia, anthropology (specifically, linguistic anthropology) in Alaska, and second language acquisition and Russian language pedagogy in Bryn Mawr. I became bilingual in Russian and English after moving the U.S. in the early 1990s. I have a deep professional and personal interest in bilingualism and, more specifically, in its particular type known as "heritage bilingualism" which describes speakers who grow up with two languages, but whose chronologically first language follows a divergent acquisitional path as a result of an interruption by the introduction of a societally dominant language. Such situations are common in immigrant families all over the world where the home language of a bilingual child becomes his or her heritage language which is much weaker than the dominant societal language of the host country. My work in the area of heritage bilingualism has focused on the production and comprehension of requests by speakers of heritage Russian in the U.S. I am also involved in an NSF-funded research project on children's language development (comparing data collected in Russia for monolingual children, and data collected in Germany and the USA for bilingual children: birch.pythonanywhere.com) and in research on orthography and spelling in adult heritage speakers of Russian.