This study focuses on the issue of language proficiency attainment among young heritage speakers of Russian living in Spain and examines factors that have been claimed to promote heritage language proficiency, namely, age, gender, age of onset to L2, quantity of exposure and family language use. A group of 30 Russian-Spanish-Catalan trilingual children aged 7–11 participated in the study. In order to measure heritage language proficiency (L1 Russian), oral narratives were elicited.

The results demonstrated a significant relationship between L1 proficiency and three sociolinguistic variables (age of onset to L2, quantity of exposure and family language use). Additionally, the multiply regression model demonstrated that the only significant variable affecting language proficiency was family language use and it accounted only for 33% of the variation of children’s language proficiency. The study raises the question about what are the other, yet unknown factors, which can affect heritage language proficiency.

本研究重点关注居住在西班牙的年轻俄语母语者的语言熟练程度问题，并检查声称可以提高母语语言能力的因素，即年龄、性别、开始到 L2 的年龄、接触次数和家庭语言利用。一组 30 名 7-11 岁的俄语-西班牙语-加泰罗尼亚语三语儿童参加了这项研究。为了衡量传统语言的熟练程度（L1 俄语），引出了口头叙述。

结果表明 L1 熟练程度与三个社会语言变量（开始到 L2 的年龄、接触量和家庭语言使用）之间存在显着关系。此外，多元回归模型表明，影响语言能力的唯一显着变量是家庭语言的使用，它仅占儿童语言能力变异的 33%。该研究提出了一个问题，即还有哪些其他未知因素会影响传统语言的熟练程度。