Russian Case Across L1, Heritage, and L2 Speakers

Author

• Reid V. Vancelette, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Linguistics

Advisor

Gita Martohardjono

Committee Members

William Haddican

Spencer Caplan

Ernesto Guerra

Subject Categories

First and Second Language Acquisition | Morphology | Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics | Russian Linguistics

Keywords

Russian case, sources of case assignment, heritage Russian, second language acquisition, sentence processing, visual world paradigm

Abstract

Much of the research on the acquisition and processing of case in Russian has focused on morphological categories rather than on sources of assignment, even though case may be assigned in different ways: structurally by syntactic position, inherently by thematic role, or lexically by particular verbs or prepositions. This dissertation investigates how case in Russian is represented and used by first-language (L1) speakers, heritage speakers, and second-language (L2) learners. It does so through an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT), which measured offline sensitivity to case violations, and a Sentence-Picture Matching (SPM) task, which measured sentence-final accuracy and response time and used eye movements to assess incremental case use during auditory comprehension. Both tasks included the same four case conditions within the verbal domain, spanning the three sources of case assignment: the structural accusative, the inherent dative, the lexical dative, and the lexical instrumental. Among these, the two dative conditions provided the critical contrast because they shared the same morphological case but differed in their source of assignment. The four conditions therefore made it possible to evaluate whether variation among them is better characterized by morphological case or by the source of case assignment.

The results of the two studies support six broad conclusions. First, sensitivity to and use of the four Russian case conditions varied systematically: L1 speakers were robust across all four, whereas heritage speakers and L2 learners showed greater variation across conditions. Second, morphological case alone does not adequately characterize this variation: overall, the inherent dative patterned more closely with the structural accusative than with the lexical dative. Third, under non-canonical word order, L2 learners showed evidence of incremental case use in the structural accusative and inherent dative conditions but not in either lexical condition. Fourth, heritage speakers showed offline sensitivity to all four conditions and online evidence of incremental case use in three, with the lexical dative as the exception. Fifth, higher proficiency was associated with sharper acceptability contrasts and greater sentence-interpretation accuracy in both the heritage-speaker and L2 groups. Among L2 learners, the proficiency-related increase in AJT sensitivity was stronger for the structural accusative and inherent dative than for the lexical conditions, with a descriptively similar pattern in the eye-movement analyses. Finally, despite the tasks' different demands, the AJT and SPM findings converged on a broadly similar organization of the four case conditions.

Taken together, these findings indicate that the source of case assignment offers an additional descriptive dimension: although it does not account for every difference among the four conditions, it captures the dative dissociation that morphological case obscures.

Recommended Citation

Vancelette, Reid V., "Russian Case Across L1, Heritage, and L2 Speakers" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6851