The present study investigated lexical production and innovation of 202 participants across six groups: child and adult heritage speakers of Russian, dominant in Hebrew or American English, and monolingual Russian-speaking children and adults. Understanding quantitative performance across these six groups was intended to provide a comprehensive perspective on heritage language (HL) development, while comparing the participants’ qualitative non-target response patterns would elucidate the organization of the HL lexicon. We assessed the production of Russian nouns and verbs using a naming task. We then considered the effects of input at the societal and lexical levels (focusing on word frequency and age of acquisition). Our findings are discussed in terms of accounts of HL developmental trajectories: monolingual-like trajectory, frozen lexical development, attrition, and new language variety in a contact situation. The results presented no evidence for attrition, while elements of the other three trajectories were found in our quantitative and qualitative analyses.

本研究调查了六组 202 名参与者的词汇生产和创新：俄语传统使用者和成人、希伯来语或美式英语占主导地位，以及单语俄语儿童和成人。了解这六个群体的定量表现旨在提供有关传统语言 (HL) 发展的全面视角，同时比较参与者的定性非目标反应模式将阐明 HL 词典的组织。我们使用命名任务评估了俄语名词和动词的产生。然后，我们考虑了输入在社会和词汇层面的影响（重点关注词频和习得年龄）。我们的研究结果是根据 HL 发展轨迹进行讨论的：类单语轨迹、词汇发展冻结、消耗以及接触情况下的新语言变化。结果没有提供磨损的证据，而在我们的定量和定性分析中发现了其他三个轨迹的元素。