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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1426831
This article is part of the Research Topic Social and Affective Domain in Home Language Development and Maintenance Research View all 5 articles

Listening comprehension in a home language: a case of Russian in Germany

Provisionally accepted
Luca Gacs Luca Gacs Anna Ritter Anna Ritter *Evghenia Goltsev Evghenia Goltsev
  • University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Listening comprehension is central to language learning, yet it remains the least understood and least researched skill (Vandergrift, 2007). This statement is still relevant today (Namaziandost et al., 2019), as there is insufficient research to explore listening comprehension from the perspective of family-related multilingualism and to consider the complete linguistic repertoire of multilingual speakers (Adamczak-Krysztofowicz and Limbach, 2019). Moreover, with regard to home language, listening comprehension is assumed to be a more developed language competence than reading or writing (Mehlhorn and Rutzen 2020). Based on the mentioned research, the aim of the present study is to investigate listening comprehension and its influencing factors specifically in German-Russian simultaneous bilinguals aged 13-19 (n=99) by considering the home- and majority language. The study uses quantitative data collection methods such as linguistic tests in Russian and German for the elicitation in different levels of listening and questionnaires for strategy use and background. The research questions are as follows: What does the language proficiency and input in Russian look like? (1) Regarding listening comprehension in Russian as a home language, are there differences between the speakers within comprehension on different levels e.g., is sound decoding easier than sentence parsing? (2) If there are differences in Russian as a home language, which linguistic and background variables can correlate with the performance of listening comprehension on its different levels? Concerning the first research question, the results show relevant differences between four different levels of listening comprehension (phoneme, word, sentence, and text level), which strengthened the assumed complexity of listening comprehension in the home language. In addition, the results show different connections between the listening comprehension competence and the input from different family members, as well as exposure to film and television in the home and majority language.

    Keywords: listening comprehension, Levels of comprehension, Home language maintenance, Bilingual family, second migrant generation

    Received: 03 May 2024; Accepted: 10 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Gacs, Ritter and Goltsev. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Anna Ritter, University of Koblenz, Koblenz, 56070, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

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