The 21st century is marked by globalization and great human mobility. This favors the development of the fields related to L2 acquisition and bilingualism. Russophone immigrants, originated from Russia and other former Soviet republics, can be found in all developed and actively developing countries. There are some studies about Russophone immigrants in Europe and North America; however, very little is published concerning Russophones in Latin America. Curiously, Russians are among 15 nationalities the ones who get the greater number of work permits in Brazil even not considering Russophones from other countries. Also, a lot of them come to Brazil due to study interests and family reasons or even for irregular migration. The main aims of our research project are: (1) characterizing the production of Brazilian Portuguese speech by native Russian speakers; (2) describing the facial expression patterns in late Russian-Portuguese bilinguals. The specific aim of our current work is to create a database of native Russian speakers in São Paulo interested in taking part in the research and perform pilot studies.
Methods and Results: Twenty native Russian speakers leaving in São Paulo took part in the full protocol testing: (1) recording speech samples in a sound-isolated cabin during 40 minutes; (2) participating in the video recording for further facial expression analysis by the program «Face Tracker 7.0» for 1,5 hours. All the tasks were performed in Portuguese and afterwards in Russian. Seven Brazilian Portuguese native speakers performed the tasks in their native language as control subjects. In conclusion, we have created a database with speech and video-recorded samples from twenty native Russian speakers living in São Paulo and analyzed pilot data.