Case system in learning Russian as a first and second foreign language

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Introduction

Recently, there has been an active discussion about the specifics of mastering the Russian language, and, consequently, the methods of teaching Russian to children and adults in different situations. Linguists are discussing questions about the acceptability and volume of such concepts as first, second, native, non-native, maternal, foreign, heritage language (a language different from the language of the environment, mastered in family in migration); bilinguals, inophones; language acquisition, language assimilation, language teaching, etc. (see, for example: Zalevskaya, Medvedeva, 2002: 7‒10; Kudryavtseva, Gromova, 2013; Moskovkin, 2019; Niznik, 2019; Khamraeva, 2018, etc.). Methodologists develop special series of textbooks for each situation, but the specifics of speech activity under different conditions are not sufficiently investigated. There are studies devoted to the mastering of Russian case system by monolingual children (Voeikova, 2015; Gvozdev, 2007; Ionova, 2007), bilingual children (Protasova et al., 2017; Janssen, Peeters-Podgaevskaya, 2016; Ringblom, 2014) and adult foreigners (Cherepovskaia et al., 2021; Kempe, Brooks, 2008; Portin et al., 2008), but the data are rarely compared (Van, 2022; Schwartz, Minkov, 2014).

We assume the idea that speech activity develops and uses procedural rules regulating the choice of a linguistic unit based on its semantic and structural functions, and in the absence of such a unit ‒ the use of a new construction. The natural way into language begins with spontaneous analysis of speech input, which results in the formation of a mental lexicon and mental grammar. At the same time, the child gets acquainted with the declarative rules later, and it is their comprehension that the native language lessons at school are aimed at. In contrast, an adult learning a language in a controlled learning situation is aimed at automatizing the skill of using declarative rules. Of course, some information is also learned implicitly; the prevalence of a “top-down” or “bottom-up” strategy depends on both the teaching methodology and the psychological characteristics of the student, but the role of consciousness in adult language learning cannot be overemphasized.

In childhood, cognitive, communicative, and linguistic development are parallel. The formation of consciousness complicates communicative intentions, which in turn, according to D. Slobin, “emerges new means to recognize the expression of these intentions in speech” (Slobin, 1984: 159). The adult, on the contrary, already knows the ways of expressing meanings in the native language, and the need to formulate thoughts in the new language significantly outstrips his or her abilities.

A child mastering Russian as a non-native language in a Russian-speaking environment receives procedural rules from the speech input, but at the same time his input is poorer than that of a monolingual, and his cognitive abilities and communicative needs tend to outstrip his linguistic abilities. We assume that the language acquisition of the monolingual child is influenced by difficulties experienced by Russian-speaking children and adult foreigners.

The analysis of difficulties experienced by native and non-native speakers of different ages in mastering the Russian case can contribute to the ideas about the general and specific features of language acquisition and, consequently, to the expansion of the potential of methodological tools.

The aim of the study is to clarify the ideas about Russian case acquisition in different learning conditions. The main object is the speech of children mastering Russian as a non-native language.

Methods and materials

At the first stage, we briefly revied studies on case acquisition by Russian-speaking children and adult speakers of different languages. In world science, research in the field of First Language Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition complement each other, but in Russian linguistics the processes of mastering Russian as a native language are studied by ontolinguists, as a foreign language ‒ by specialists in the field of Russian as a foreign language (RFL), and often the achievements of both remain unknown to representatives of related fields, so the comparative-analytical method seems extremely relevant.

Then we relied on the data obtained by the longitudinal method, i.e. the method of the included long-term observation of Russian speech of foreign-speaking children in natural environment. The observation of the strategies of choosing and constructing case and prepositional-case word forms (hereinafter CF, PCF) in the speech of four native Azerbaijani speakers 4‒6 years old was conducted by S.N. Ceytlin. The scientist observed situations of relaxed communication between the child and the experimenter, notes were made by hand, and then systematized and analyzed (100 innovations were analyzed for the article).

The study also includes speech recordings of 33 junior school students from School No. 624 in St. Petersburg, native speakers of Turkic and Caucasian languages made by G.S. Rogozhkina. The observations were made during additional Russian classes and included both the recordings of natural speech and pupils' answers to questions specially designed by the teacher. The recordings were handwritten and include about 150 noun innovations. The materials are stored in the Children's Speech Data Fund (Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University, Institute of linguistic studies RAS).

We deliberately avoided the experimental method, and therefore our study does not provide the quantitative data common for modern research. We are convinced that in an experimental situation children rely on different mechanisms of speech activity than in natural environment, and therefore the experimental data presented in the scientific literature need additional verification with other, “environmentally friendly” methods.

Results

Comparison of data on Russian case system mastering by Russian monolingual children, bilingual children mastering Russian as a second native language, and adult foreigners with the analysis of observation of the speech of children mastering Russian as a non-native language in natural communication allowed us to formulate the results of the study.

1. Children and adults, mastering the language in natural and artificial environment, independently construct its grammar and make errors due to the specificity of the case category structure.
2. At the initial stages, foreign-speaking children and adults use morphological reduction, ignore some syntactic constructions, eliminate semantic and formal differences between language units.
3. Procedural rules are produced through categorization of representations of CFs and PCFs. During speech perception, the listener's attention is focused on comprehending the meaning, and the sum of lexical and morphological meanings is mastered in the background.
4. A Russian-speaking child makes errors in choice less often than foreign-speaking children and adults. These errors are easier to explain logically, and they disappear more quickly.
5. The linguistic, cognitive, and communicative development of the monolingual child is harmonious, his input is comfortably organized. The development of syntax and morphology is interrelated and occurs gradually. Children who master Russian as a non-native language, have an imbalance between cognitive and communicative development, on the one hand, and the level of language proficiency, on the other. The readiness to build a multi-component utterance may significantly outpace the possibilities of grammatical variation.
6. Acquiring a language, a person moves from the use of frozen PCFs to their separation and pattern awareness, and then the PCFs are stored and retrieved from memory in their speech activity.
7. In the absence of the necessary CF or in case of difficult access to the mental lexicon, the form is constructed. Construction errors are caused by complex Russian morphology. When using a language learned in a learning situation, a person tends to retrieve ready-made CFs from memory; in natural language acquisition, CFs construction is more frequent.
8. A native speaker tends to retrieve a ready-made syntaxeme framework with a preposition and a corresponding inflection from memory; non-native speakers construct PCFs.
9. The fact that speakers of typologically different languages make the same mistakes when mastering Russian suggests that the cause of the mistakes is related to the fact that the language system being mastered is secondary, and not to the pressure of the native language.

Discussion

The specificity of mastering cases is determined by the content and expression plan of this category. In terms of content, it is necessary to master the semantic potential of each of the case grammemes, which increases when combining CF with prepositions. The grammeme can be chosen not only by its semantic function, but also by lexical requirements: some verbs and prepositions are used with certain CFs. The choice is complicated by grammatical homonymy and homophony. Thus, when perceiving the ending [i], the listener has to take into account the meanings of Nominative, Genitive, and Accusative inflection (orthographic inflection -i), Dative and Prepositional inflection (orthographic inflection -e).

CFs and PCFs can be extracted from the mental lexicon ready-made, the degree of their fixation in memory directly depends on the frequency of lexemes and allolexes, on the productivity and regularity of word-pronunciation patterns. Mastering the plan of expression implies the ability to construct CF if the necessary units are absent or access to them is difficult. Three declension variants in the soft and hard varieties; stresslessness of endings complicating the attribution of a noun to a certain type; variative forms of Genitive, Nominative Singular and Plural, Prepositional, Genitive Singular and Plural of masculine nouns; morphonological changes in the base may interfere with the correct formation of CFs.

Let us present data characterizing the mastering of the expression and content of the case category in different situations of mastering the Russian language.

Mastering case grammar by a Russian-speaking child. Since the first diaries of speech development were published, researchers have been discussing the ways of constructing the forms and the order of their appearance in speech (Gvozdev, 2007: 393). They note that initially nouns are presented in Nominative inflectional form, the first opposition of Nominative/Accusative inflectional forms allows the child to label subject and object differently. The further sequence can be different, but, as M.D. Voeikova notes, the forms of indirect cases, including Accusative case, appear almost simultaneously (Voeikova, 2015: 144). N.I. Lepskaya believed that, despite numerous attempts, the order of case acquisition has no scientific value: small children master meanings before the ways of their expression or use their own grammar methods such as word order (Lepskaya, 1997: 64‒67). Other researchers come to similar conclusions (Babyonyshev, 1993; Murashova, 2000; Ionova, 2007).

The fact that meanings are acquired before ways of their expression explains the absence of errors in the choice of CF (Gvozdev, 2007: 394; Voeikova, 2015: 144; Ionova, 2007: 77; Ufimtseva, 2015: 118, etc.). At the same time, according to N.V. Ufimtseva, in children's speech “case meanings are characterized by greater simplicity and consistency than in adult language” (Ufimtseva, 2015: 118). The use of CF at the early stages is supergeneralized. Thus, A. observed for a long time until the age of 2 years 10 months used -u to express any object meanings, and in T.'s speech (1 year 10 months old) -ami indicated the object both in plural and in singular.

Most researchers note that flexion is mastered before preposition (Gvozdev, 2007: 458). N.I. Lepskaya provides information about the use of a preposition with a pseudo-Nominative form, but also notes that children rarely combine a preposition with irregular ending (Lepskaya, 1997: 66-67).

Having observed the construction of forms, we developed a classification of innovations in forms (Ceytlin, 2009: 160‒198) and some default rules of CF formation were discovered (preference for the -ov inflection in the Genitive case, Plural, using nouns ending in an accentless vowel as feminine ones, etc.).

Two strategies for processing morphologically complex words have been described: storing ready-made CFs in the mental lexicon and decomposing them into separate morphemes and then reconstructing them in speech. The choice of strategy depends on the psychological features of the individual and the linguistic characteristics of the word: word frequency, regularity, and productivity of the word-formation model. Scientists prove that the choice of strategy is conditioned by the regularity of morphological rules, the perceptual convexity of grammemes, and the degree of variation of morphemes in the language being learned (Portin et al., 2007: 137; Janssen, 2016: 288). The question of how often Russian children, compared to children mastering languages with less complex morphology, prefer analytical forms and when they construct a form remains open.

Mastering case grammar in a situation of simultaneous infant bilingualism. Simultaneous bilingualism is understood as simultaneous acquisition of several languages. There are data about Russian case mastering in the situations of simultaneous acquisition of Russian and Georgian (Imedadze, 1979), Finnish (Protasova et al., 2017), German (Janssen, Meir, 2019), Hebrew (Schwartz, Minkov, 2014), Dutch (Janssen, Peeters-Podgaevskaya, 2016), English (Bar-Shalom, Zaretsky, 2008; Chirsheva, 2012), Swedish (Ringblom, 2014). Researchers note the commonality of case system formation in speakers of different first languages, as well as in monolinguals and bilinguals. G.N. Chirsheva argues that errors in the speech of bilinguals are caused not by the influence of the native language, but by the characteristic features of assimilation of substantive constructions (Chirsheva, 2012: 273).

First, parallelism is evident in form construction. Thus, Russian-Finnish bilinguals are characterized by non-dropping of mobile vowels, difficulties in mastering the Neuter gender, accent transfer (Protasova et al., 2017: 783), while children with first Hebrew have difficulties in realizing the category of animacy, mastering the Neuter gender and the 3rd declension, innovations in the Genitive Plural, including substitutions of the Genitive/Preposition cases (Schwartz, Minkov, 2014: 55).

М. Schwartz and M. Minkov believe that children who learned Russian at the stage of forming basic skills in inflectional grammar can construct CF. Their errors are more stable, which is caused by the quality of the Russian input (Schwartz, Minkov, 2014: 55). Another explanation of tempo delays was proposed by N.V. Imedadze. In her experiment, Russian-Georgian bilinguals, answering a question with a grammar error that did not distort meaning, did not notice the mistake (Imedadze, 1979: 46‒53). This suggests that bilinguals rely more on lexical markers than on case ones.

Orientation on lexical markers leads to the long-term preservation of “frozen forms” of the Nominaitve case (Protasova et al., 2017: 782; Bar-Shalom, Zaretsky, 2008: 295; Janssen, 2016: 292). The small amount of published data does not allow us to draw conclusions about mastering certain semantic functions: for example, the incorrect forms of Nominative case (Schwartz, Minkov, 2014: 78) in negative constructions and when indicating co-occurrence do not indicate that they have not learned the subject meaning.

The fact that the lag occurs not in the comprehension of meanings, but in the ways of their expression is evidenced by the correct choice of a preposition with an incorrect inflection recorded by E. Schmitt in the speech of English-Russian bilinguals (Schmitt, 2004). In conditions of inflection deficit, bilinguals use their own grammar ways: for example, in the speech of Russian-Dutch children, the first word gets the meaning of the subject (Janssen, Peeters-Podgaevskaya, 2016: 151).

Unfortunately, information about the ways multilingual children label semantic functions is sporadic (Modyanova, 2006; Schwartz, Minkov, 2014: 79). Nevertheless, the available data allow us to trace both common for bilinguals and monolinguals strategies and specific bilingual ones.

Mastering case grammar in the situation of educational bilingualism. Studies devoted to case acquisition are usually aimed at developing optimal methods of teaching Russian as a foreign language, but there are few Russian works devoted to linguistic analysis of the causes of foreign students' errors in case grammar.

Linguists try to find out what strategies a person uses in speech activity in a foreign language. The respondents in experiments are asked to use a certain CF (Kempe, Brooks, 2008), to find errors (Cherepovskaia et al., 2021), to correlate a picture with an utterance (Kempe, MacWhinney, 1998). The experiments also measure the speed of understanding monoand polymorphemic words (Portin et al., 2008). At the same time, the question of similarity between strategies in 1st and 2nd language remains unanswered, since a foreigner, even with C1‒C2 proficiency, may use specific strategies (Cherepovskaia et al., 2021). It is concluded that foreigners rarely use morphological decomposition in speech perception and individual formation in speech production. This may be due to the way of learning or the peculiarities of the language mechanism. Thus, H. Clahsen emphasizes the low possibility of implicit knowledge acquisition by adults (Clahsen et al., 2010: 38). V. Kempe and P.J. Brooks conclude that implicit rule extraction is hindered by the complexity of the Russian case system (Kempe, Brooks, 2008). F. Prévost and L. White believe that foreigners have difficulty not in rule extraction but in their realization in speech, experiencing excessive cognitive load in communication (Prévost, White, 2000).

Methodists describe formative innovations of speakers of different languages: difficulties in determining the gender, the place of word stress, making forms of Genitive Plural. Generally, errors are caused by the fact that the grammar system being mastered is secondary, but it is worth noting the coincidence between the speech of foreign and Russian-speaking children.

Construction errors rarely come to the attention of methodologists. More often they record errors of choice, such as mixing prepositions that are close or opposite in meaning; choosing the wrong inflection, including in verbs with strong government; irregular government in polysemantic prepositions (Danilova, Yurkina, 2020: 181‒183). Such errors are easily explained by systemic semantic relations.

However, foreigners can use CFs unmotivated from the native speaker's point of view, which are usually interpreted as a result of interference. Thus, the specific expression of attributive meaning by Turkish students (Timoshenko-Ozdemir, Savitskaya, 2020) is explained by the fact that in Russian the determiner is put in Genitive, whereas in Turkish single-affix izafet the determiner gets the suffix.

At the same time, interference can be greatly exaggerated ‒ most errors are similar in the speech of speakers of different languages. Thus, English, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese speakers express Instrumentative by the construction “with + Instrumental case”, the benefactive and malefactive by the Accusative without a preposition, avoid Genitive in negation, use Nominative case in impersonal sentences and counting combinations, etc. (Kholodkova, 2012; Unezheva, 2016; Timoshenko-Ozdemir, Savitskaya, 2020; Van, 2022). Similar errors points to the generalization strategy: in conditions of language deficit, a person encodes grammatical meanings using general ideas about the ways of their expression.

A strategy common to all foreign language learners is morphological reduction, i.e., ignoring grammatical categories. Since there are no unmarked case forms in Russian, reduction can lead to an extended use of one of the existing ones (usually Nominative case).

In conditions of language deficit, foreigners use grammatical methods optional for Russian. W. Kempe and B. MacWhinney found that native English speakers make decisions about object-subject relations based on lexical meaning and word order (SVO) rather than on the meaning of inflection (Kempe, MacWhinney, 1998: 566).

Thus, mastering Russian as a foreign language, a person individually builds a system of expressing case meanings, moving from the “frozen nominative” to other grammatical means. It is no coincidence that linguists draw parallels between 1st and 2nd language acquisition analyzing the patterns of “case emergence” (Cherepovskaia et al., 2021). However, the questions about the sequence in which the need to express certain grammatical meanings arises in Russian speech, which semantic functions are poorly verbalized, and what formal difficulties arise in the process of constructing CFs and PCFs remain open.

Mastering case grammar in a situation of successive natural bilingualism. Successive natural bilingualism is the sequential acquisition of two languages under the conditions of natural communication. The process of constructing the Russian case system under these conditions is has several peculiarities.

Cognitive abilities and communicative needs determine the syntactic complexity of the Russian child's utterances, so it is reasonable to build periodization with a quantitative criterion, correlating the number of units in an utterance with the emergence of case oppositions (Voeikova, 2015: 166). From the very beginning, foreign children build extended, but grammatically poorly formalized and elliptical utterances due to lexical deficit. This causes problems in communication and sharply distinguishes the speech of foreign-speaking and Russian-speaking children.

Analyzing the case grammar of an inophone, one can rely on the morphological criterion. In the project “Early Stages of Morphology Acquisition by Children” W.U. Dressler considers the stages of premorphology, protomorphology and modular morphology depending on the degree of mastering the language paradigmatics (Voeikova, Gagarina, 2002). The stadiality is also preserved in the grammar acquisition by a foreign-speaking child, although it is slightly different.

At the premorphological stage, the system of parts of speech is not formed, grammatical categories are absent. The active vocabulary contains mainly nouns in Nominative Singular, which is often appropriate, since the CF is used to nominate an object, to indicate the subject, including in impersonal constructions or when denoting the sender, appears in counting combinations and in sentences with negation.

The CFs coinciding with basic ones can be derived from the Genitive Plural form or the Accusative case of inanimate nouns. Homonymic CFs in the input makes it difficult to distinguish the ways of expressing meanings and causes innovations: mnogo uchebnik ‘many manuals’, poimali slon ‘caught the elephant’. The Nominative case can be used by a foreign-speaking child in supergeneralized meanings, marking the comitative (s mama prichel ‘came with his mother’), the instrumentative (budu ruchka pisat’ ‘I will write with a pen’), the causative (yama ot bomba ‘hole from the bomb’). As in adult foreigners, frozen forms remain for a long time, especially if the semantic functions of the CF are clear from the situation. They express objective (pyatyorka poluchal ‘I got a five’), attributive (miska iz stekla ‘a bowl made of glass’), circumstantial meanings (v shkola poidu ‘I will go to school’, iz-za probka opozdal ‘I am late because of the traffic-jam’); they are used in combination with prepositions.

Russian children also use pseudo-Nominative forms, but when mastering prepositions, they usually immediately use the whole syntaxeme framework ‒ the preposition and the corresponding inflection. At the initial stages, prepositions are omitted or replaced by fillers in accordance with Slobin's operational principle “Pay attention to the end of the word” (Slobin, 1984: 167). In contrast, foreign-speaking children are more attentive to prepositions, which may be due to perception of perceptually non-obvious Russian inflections. Difficult perception of reduced inflection leads to the omission of endings, including accented ones, as in Russian-speaking children under 2 years of age (Babyonyshev, 1993: 15).

The base form can be the form of one of the indirect cases. For example, adjectives denoting color are “frozen” in the form of the Genitive case (kakogo tsveta? ‘what colour is it?’), which gives a native Russian speaker a feeling of agrammaticality: v krasnogo shapka ‘in a red hat’. Such case mismatches are not found in the speech of even the youngest Russian-speaking children.

The absence of case markers in utterances of substantial length forces the child to use other grammatical ways, such as word order (SVO).

The prolonged preference for reduced and frozen forms is caused by the complex task of the inophone: the input he/she processes is poorly organized and not adapted to the capabilities of the “neophyte”; the verbalized situation is complex and non-standard. In addition, the native language case meanings are often not specifically labeled, or the type of labeling does not coincide with the Russian one. The more complex the conveyed meanings are and the more unique their linguistic design is, the stronger is their cognitive load and the reduction is more likely to occur. Simplification at the early stages is inevitable in the acquisition of any language under any conditions, and in the situation of mass bilingualism it leads to pidginization.

Reduction can be expressed in the choice of the inflection under the influence of syntagmatic relations with the dependent adjective (pishu prostom karandashom ‘I’m writing with a graphite pencil’) and noun (za pamyatnikom Pushkinom ‘behind the monument to Pushkin’). Unlike native speakers, inophones rarely notice their own mistake, and the influence of context in their speech extends beyond the word-combination: udkoy lovyat rybu ‘they are catching fish with a fishing rod’, mamu sdelal podarku ‘he gave the present to his mother’.  The priming effect helps to explain seemingly unmotivated choices: for example, ending -om in o bolshom ezhom ‘about a big hedgehog’ similarly formalize the objective meaning of an adjective and a noun.

Despite the complex task faced by the foreign child, errors are not obligatory even at the early stages, which is explained by M. Tomasello's island hypothesis (Tomasello, 2002): the most frequent PCFs are stored in memory in a gestalt manner, the verbs in them serve as “islands” to which noun-ships gradually “dock”, which decomposes the whole construction into elements.

At the protomorphological stage, the basic functions of grammemes and prototypical grammatical modes are mastered. Like the Russian-speaking preschooler, the inophone moves from the “frozen Nominative” to the “frozen Accusative”: the basic forms mark the subject, while the ending -u marks the object (vyrezala bumagu ‘she cut out the paper’, pomogal mamu ‘he helped his mother’). The increasing complexity of communication makes it necessary to find ways to distinguish between objective and circumstantial meanings. Distinguishing the nuances and mastering the combining power of certain verbs occurs at the final stage. In the Russian-speaking child's speech, new constructions appear gradually when there it is necessary to indicate nuances: for example, the mobility/immobility of an instrument (Instrumental/Accusative + o) or its supplementary character (Instrumental/Instrumental + s). The foreign-speaking child's repertoire of means can be broad from the very beginning. Sometimes the irregular choice accurately conveys the meanings (namochil o luzhu ‘he wet his hand on a puddle’, smotrit s ochkami ‘looks with glasses’), but often PCFs are used in inappropriate contexts (ob mylo ruku moet ‘he washes his hand on soap’, pishet s ruchkoy ‘writes with a pen’).

Interference contributes to supergeneralization. Thus, the indication of the direction from inside/outside, which is difficult for Azerbaijani children, is due to the peculiarities of the Azerbaijani language, where the movement to the localizer is indicated by the dative suffix, and from the localizer ‒ by the initial one (polozhite v ryukzakam ‘put it in your backpacks’, upal iz stula ‘fell from the chair’). The indistinction of prepositions in one of their meanings may lead to their confusion in the other meaning (kartinka iz malchishkoy ‘picture from the boy’, i.e. with the boy).

Formative innovations also point to the active language use. Foreign-speaking children make mistakes more often than adults, who are often cautious in using a foreign language. Children have difficulties in determining the type of declension of Neuter nouns and words ending in a soft consonant. For speakers of Turkic languages, nouns of all three genders, including those with a hard base, pose a problem. In addition to errors in Instrumental case, which is difficult for native speakers of Turkic languages, Turkic-speaking children incorrectly construct Nominative case according to the masculine type (zhelty kukuruz ‘yellow corn’) and Accusative case according to the feminine type: vizhu nebu ‘I see the sky’, prinesu uchebniku ‘I will bring the textbook’ (Accusative form ending in -u is characteristic of monolinguals of early age).

Foreign-speaking and Russian-speaking children incorrectly form the Local case of masculine nouns (na rucksaku ‘on the backpack’), the Nominative case Plural of masculine and neuter words (domy ‘houses’, derevy ‘trees’), the Genitive case Plural (vosem stulov ‘eight chairs’, bez igrushkov ‘without toys’), neglect morphological changes in the bases (zaychonki ‘small hares’, molotokom ‘with a hammer’, uhi ‘ears’). The fixed accent is often retained on the base and on the ending (u stóla ‘near the table, udaril rukū ‘struck his hand’).

Unlike Russian-speaking children, inophones make mistakes in constructing not only CFs, but also PCFs. In the Russian child's mind, the morphological framework of a syntaxeme is formed from the very beginning, while the inophone has to construct this framework individually, unifying, for example, the inflection in antonymic PCFs: s usami bez borodami ‘with moustache without beard’, k dedushku ot babushku ‘to grandfather from grandmother’ (Dative dedushku by analogy with masculine).

The language of “real grammar” analysis (V.B. Kasevich's term) has not yet been developed, and it is difficult to comment on the “sound – meaning” relation outside the usual case labels. But the researcher often does not have sufficient grounds to judge what meaning the child perceived and expressed. Thus, the inflection in gonyalsya za dvo[ьm] zayts[ьm] ‘chased after two hares’ can be represented as Instrumental case and irregular agreement in number (za odnim saytsem ‘after one hare’) or Dative case, plural in the meaning of a malefactive with an irregular preposition za. If the question is posed in this way, we seem to proceed from the belief that the individual system of the foreigner coincides with the national system, and the error is made at the moment of speech generation. Indeed, generalization takes place at the stage of perception, and here it would be more accurate to state that “za +[ъm](ьm)” indicates a landmark or a goal of movement. In the absence of convenient tools for analysis, we can only outline the directions of ontogenesis of case syntaxemes in the speech of foreign speakers.

Conclusion

Our study is not complete. A unified toolkit to investigate “real grammar” has to be developed and the empirical base should be expanded. Quantitative experimental data should be obtained to compare the acquisition of case grammar in different contexts and across different languages.

However, it is already clear: the strategies of first and second language acquisition are similar in many ways, but also differ significantly. Ontolinguists and specialists in Russian as a foreign language have already collected a lot of facts about each of these strategies, and at the present stage of science it is necessary to join efforts for their comparative analysis.

Psycholinguistic studies of the processes accompanying the formation of language mechanisms of children and adults should be used to build individually oriented methods of teaching Russian as a non-native language, considering the age and level of cognitive and speech development of learners.

Inophone children need specific linguistic support. Since the child individually constructs the grammatical system of both the first and the second language, the lessons and additional classes in Russian as a non-native language should provide extensive speech material to allow children to independently realize the differences between different PCFs expressing different types of objective and circumstantial meanings. The use of texts, including fiction, based on language play seems to be a good solution.

Specific errors in the choice of forms in the speech of foreign-speaking children makes it impossible to simply follow the programs for Russian as a native language. Foreign-speaking children should be offered special tasks and linguodidactic games that will help them to realize the specifics of CF and PCF, the connection between the choice of preposition and the case ending of the word.

Morphological reduction in the speech of a foreign speaker is caused by an imbalance between the needs to express complex meanings and the possibilities of their linguistic expression. A well-thought-out pre-textual lexical-grammatical work and the choice of topics for conversations with foreign-speaking children can help to eliminate this imbalance.

About the authors

Stella N. Ceytlin

Herzen University

Email: stl2006@list.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1222-2968
SPIN-code: 3891-9220

Doctor of Philology, Professor, Professor of the Department of Language and Literary Development of the Child

48 Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki, St. Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation

Tatiana A. Kruglyakova

St. Petersburg State University

Author for correspondence.
Email: t.kruglyakova@spbu.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4408-7673
SPIN-code: 6409-3610

Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language and Methodology of its Teaching

7-9 Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya, 199034, Russian Federation

References