Processing of case forms in L2 speakers of Russian
Reutova E.*, Slioussar N.*,**
*St.Petersburg State University, Russia; **Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS, the Netherlands
lizareutova@gmail.com
Very little is known about the acquisition and processing of case morphology by L2 speakers of
Russian. We report an experiment focusing on this topic and compare our results to the results
from analogous experiments with native speakers (Slioussar & Cherepovskaia 2013). Our
experiment was a self-paced reading task followed by grammaticality judgment. We had 27 sets of
target sentences like (1a-c) with prepositions taking Genitive, Prepositional and Dative (control
condition where morphological ambiguity plays no role) and 29 fillers.
(1) a/b/c. Pirogi dlja ljubimyx gostej / gostjax / gostjam byli sladkimi.
Pies for belovedGEN.PL=PREP.PL guestsGEN.PL / PREP.PL / DAT.PL were sweat.
In each set, one sentence was correct and two contained case errors. Every subject saw one
sentence from each set. Experiments with native speakers demonstrated that errors like (1b) are
noticed later and produce a smaller delay in self-paced reading and are more often missed in
grammaticality judgment than errors like (1c) due to the morphological ambiguity factor. Our
experiment demonstrated that all L2 participants independently from their proficiency give more
incorrect answers to sentences like (1b) compared to sentences like (1c), just as native speakers
do. However, there are no reading time differences between these sentences, unlike with native
speakers. Online, Genitive forms are read slower than Prepositional and Dative forms, no matter
what case the preposition requires (i.e. no matter whether these forms are correct or not). For
native speakers, there are no significant differences between different case forms.
Slioussar, N., & Cherepovskaia, N. (2013). Processing of case morphology: Evidence from Russian.
Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, 12, 726-735.
Keywords: L2, Russian, case