“How Often Do You Encounter the Verb Obnaruzhit’?” Subjective Frequency of Russian Verbs in Heritage Speakers and Other Types of Russian–German Bilinguals

Abstract

The literature shows that word frequency data obtained from corpora (corpus frequency, CF) and L1 speaker estimation (subjective frequency, SF) are substantially correlated. However, little is known about languages other than English and the frequency estimation of different types of bilingual speakers. We address both issues and compare the correlation coefficients of the CF and SF for 49 Russian verbs as well as SF data between four groups of Russian speakers: monolinguals (MOs), late bilinguals (LBs), heritage speakers (HSs), and foreign language learners (FLs). We gained SF data from a frequency estimation study with 447 participants and found that despite the reduced exposure to Russian in the three bilingual groups, their SF data were correlated with the CF at the same level (moderately) as the monolinguals’ SF. Interestingly, the correlations between the SF of the MOs, LBs, and HSs were very high, indicating that the SF is extremely stable over different speaker groups and that HSs do not differ from other L1 speakers in this respect. Furthermore, in absolute terms, HSs judged the verbs consistently lower than LBs and MOs, demonstrating that speakers have a finely adjusted ability to estimate the frequency with which they encounter words. The learners, on the other hand, were a clearly distinguished group, with only moderate correlations with all groups of L1 speakers.