On-line Comprehension of Russian Case Cues in Monolingual Russian and Bilingual Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew Children

For a correct interpretation of the thematic roles of constituents of a sentence, the relation between those constituents has to be understood. For each language, a combination of specific interpretation cues leads to a correct understanding of a sentence, and one of the comprehension cues is most reliable. The speed and success rate of children in acquiring those cues most relevant for their language depends on the cue reliability, cue availability and the cue strength. The case cue is the most powerful cue in interpreting thematic roles and pragmatic functions in inflecting languages like Russian (MacWhinney, 2005). There are relatively few studies on the processing of case cues and comprehension strategies: by monolinguals in German (e.g. Dittmar, AbbotSmith, Lieven, Tomasello, 2008; Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2014; Schipke, Knoll, Friederici, Oberecker, 2012), and by bilinguals in Lajamanu Walpiri and Light Walpiri (O'Shannessy, 2010). In Russian, most of the available studies focus on case production, so that little is known about case comprehension and case processing. Our study aims to close this gap by investigating case cue processing in monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian-Dutch and RussianHebrew children. Dutch and Hebrew are both languages with a sparse case morphology. Further, we aim to explore the effects of age of L2 onset (AoO), length of exposure to the language of society (LoE) and home language use.