Nathalie Topaj, project coordinator in the Interdisciplinary Research Alliance (IFV): Language Development of Elementary School Children with Migrant Backgrounds, successfully defended her dissertation on August 24th at Humboldt University on the question of how bilingual Russian-German children use referring words such as articles, pronouns or pre- and postscript nominal expressions in comparison to monolingual Russian and German children. The data are based on re-tellings of picture stories; around 130 children aged four to six in St. Petersburg and Berlin took part in the studies. The main result: After some transmission effects in younger children, bilingual six-year-olds use the respective repertoire of linguistic means surprisingly appropriately, despite the large differences between the languages.