Abstract
This paper explores motivational reflection as a linguistic and cognitive process in children’s speech, grounding the research in three interconnected approaches: psycholinguistic, motivational, and comparative. The aim of the study is to examine motivational reflection and identify both universal and language-specific patterns of its manifestation in monolingual and bilingual children. The study is based on a controlled psycholinguistic experiment and employs a motivational–comparative analytical framework to examine children’s interpretation of motivated lexical units in Russian and Kazakh. The empirical corpus consists of metalinguistic responses produced by monolingual and bilingual children aged 5–6, 7–8, and 9–10. To organize the data, motivational passports were created, recording parameters such as the internal structure of words, types of lexical and structural motivation, motivation models, and features reflecting children’s conceptualization of lexical meaning. The study primarily focuses on comparing motivational reflection between monolingual and bilingual speakers, with particular attention to age-related development and language dominance patterns. Special emphasis was placed on spontaneous word creation, seen as evidence of deeper cognitive and linguistic processes. Results show that monolinguals generally have higher levels of MR, while bilinguals display more creativity and variability in vocabulary understanding, often bridging gaps through diverse associative strategies. The study advances research on children’s speech development and may be applied to teaching Russian and Kazakh in both monolingual and bilingual educational settings.