The long-term BIVEM study was carried out from 2012 to 2016 at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (Leibniz-ZAS) in Berlin, Germany, under the direction of Natalia Gagarina, coordination of Nathalie Topaj and active participation of other colleagues. The study was funded by the Senate of Berlin within the Berlin Interdisciplinary Network for Multilingualism (BIVEM) as well as by Leibniz-ZAS and BMBF.
The BIVEM study dealt with effectiveness of language support measures (additive vs. integrative) from early age on language development of Russian-German and Turkish-German bilingual children between 2 and 6 years old, with influence of age of onset and length of exposure to German and influence of home language on language development as well as with other aspects of language acquisition. In total, over 160 bilingual children participated in the study, starting from age 2;1 to 3;11. After a pretest three cycles of language support measures took place over a period of four years, each time followed by an extensive test phase. MAIN was a part of the test battery.
MAIN was conducted in Russian, Turkish, and German, with elicitation modes model story + comprehension questions followed by telling + comprehension questions (pretest – post 2); in the last test phase (post 3) telling + comprehension questions. A subset of data with a detailed information on testing points and age groups was published in open access at Zenodo.
More information about the study can be found here.