Palatalized and palatal consonants in Italian–Russian bilingual schoolchildren’s perception

Within the growing body of research on segmental phonological spaces in simultaneous bilinguals, heritage speakers, and other populations of young language users raised in bilingual environments, studies focusing on Slavic languages remain sporadic (Brehmer, 2021). Nevertheless, Slavic consonantal systems offer an intriguing perspective on the organization of bilingual phonologies, due to the presence of numerous velarization/palatalization contrasts and the rich combinatorics of consonantal clusters. A recent analysis of orthographic errors committed by college-age heritage learners of Russian with dominant English (Kisselev, Dubinina, & Paquette, 2024) highlights the difficulties they encounter, notably in spelling positional variations of and in marking palatalization. However, the exact nature of these spelling difficulties has yet to be investigated experimentally. It remains unclear whether these challenges arise solely from heritage speakers’ limited experience with rules of Cyrillic orthography, or whether they reflect perceptual outcomes rooted in phonological representations that deviate from those developed by L1 speakers (Lukyanchenko & Gor, 2011). In this study, we report the first perception data collected from schoolchildren aged 6–12 years who acquired Russian from one or both parents at birth and currently have Italian as their dominant societal language (attended primary schools in Northern Italy). Participants completed an ABX discrimination task involving pairs of 40 stimuli (trisyllabic nonce words presented as “names” of imaginary animals), 16 of which were specifically designed to test children’s ability to distinguish between velarized and palatalized consonants (schematically, ma vs. mja), as well as clusters featuring a prevocalic voiced palatal consonant (mjja). The experimental design also included variations in consonants, vowels, and stimulus presentation order as within-subject independent variables. A logistic regression analysis of the initial sample (13 females and 6 males, mean age 8.8) shows that heritage speakers of Russian performed above chance level in discriminating velarized vs. palatalized contrasts (e.g., ma vs. mja). However, they struggled with the mja/mjja contrasts, exhibiting success rates comparable to those previously attested for intermediate L2 learners (Duryagin & Geromel, 2021). Notably, the data is indicative of an interaction between the following vowel and the presence of a "yod": discrimination success rates for mu vs. mju were higher, whereas performance on mju vs. mjju was lower (in both cases, compared to the analogous syllables with the vowel a). Additional data collection is underway to further test the findings observed in the current sample. However, our preliminary results suggest that, despite the apparently target-like production of consonant clusters with palatals among Russian heritage speakers, their perception may lag behind production.