Cherepovskaia, N. 1 , Reutova, E. 2 , Pérez-Vidal, C. . 1 & Slioussar, N. 3, 2
1 Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
2 St.Petersburg State University, Russia
3 Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
Is there any qualitative difference in processing mechanisms in L1 and
L2 speakers? We address this major question studying processing of
case errors in Russian. Russian has six cases, adjectives agree with
nouns. Some adjective forms are ambiguous between different cases
(e.g. Gen.Pl and Loc.Pl). Native speakers often produce particular
errors: when case A is required, and an adjective is ambiguous between
cases A and B, the noun appears in case B. Slioussar and Cherepovskaia
(2014) demonstrated that such errors produce a smaller delay during
self-paced reading and cause more grammaticality judgment mistakes
than other errors.
We conducted similar experiments with 29 American and 18 (to be
continued) Catalan-Spanish students of Russian. American students
(intermediate and advanced level) showed the same distribution of
offline errors as native speakers did, but a different picture online
(no matter which case was required, Genitive forms were the slowest).
This supports the view suggested by Clahsen et al. (2013): some
mechanisms in L1 and L2 processing are the same, but there is a delay.
Catalan-Spanish students (beginner level) are similar to Americans in
online results, but the distribution of offline errors is different
showing that sentence-level processing mechanisms are still forming.