A comparative analysis of request strategies in Russian monolingual and Russian-Hebrew bilingual children

This study examines the development of pragmatic competence in request formation among Russian-speaking monolingual and bilingual Russian–Hebrew children aged 5 to 8, for whom Russian is their Heritage Language (HL) and Hebrew is their Societal Language (SL). Using a pragmatic elicitation task, we analyzed responses from 56 children across formal and informal scenarios to assess differences in request strategies, including address forms, sentence types, modals, morphosyntactic particles, and lexical mitigators like ‘please.’ Results indicate that monolingual peers displayed a broader and more contextually appropriate range of strategies, while bilingual children demonstrated reduced sensitivity to formality, often relying on informal address forms and impersonal modals in contexts that typically demand formal requests. This pattern might stem from cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from Hebrew and limited exposure to formal Russian, which may shape both early-acquired pragmatic features, such as basic politeness markers, and later-developing phenomena, including nuanced formality distinctions and particle use. To conclude, we suggest that pragmatic development in bilingual children reflects more than simple transfer or developmental delay; it emerges from a dynamic interplay between linguistic competence, environmental input, and socio-cultural adaptation.