language acquisition

The article deals with Russian-language narratives produced by bilingual children aged 4–6 year, living in Kyrgyzstan and speaking both Russian and Kyrgyz languages. Children are developing in the situation of «mixed bilingualism», with Russian as a dominant language. Narratives were collected using the MAIN experimental tool, which includes several sets of pictures for telling/retelling stories, standard texts for retellings, and tables for evaluating speaking skills.

The paper regards the process of the development of several features of the narrative speech genre in the discourse field of Russian culture while learning Russian as a second language. Referentiality in general linguistic sense is an area concerning naming of objects and characters by language means. In this paper we analyse the problems of the referential choice (what factors influence the speaker’s choice of a referential expression) and anaphora resolution (how the listener/reader binds an anaphoric pronoun to a coreferential noun phrase).