The Role of Working Memory in the Acquisition of L2 Russian Case

With the development of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, the view of individual differences has been evolving and now includes concepts such as cognitive processing and Working Memory (WM) (e.g., Doughty, 2019; Jackson, 2020; McConnell, 2023; Wen & Teng, 2023). The present study contributes to this line of research by investigating the relationship between WM capacity and the accuracy of L2 Russian case inflection production by complete beginners in instructional settings, which is an under-researched area. The data are part of a larger study, which involved a 20-week teaching intervention with English-speaking volunteers (n=27), who were taught two Russian cases (Prepositional and Accusative). Participants’ case accuracy in extemporaneous speech was measured in three rounds of testing using specially designed elicitation tools. Contrary to many WM studies, low-WM participants, who had the lowest initial scores, achieved the most significant improvement. The study showed that other participants’ trajectories varied considerably. In addition, the majority demonstrated a drop in accuracy (reported by Cherepovskaia et al., 2021) that aligns with the introduction of the second case, which could possibly be explained by the two case inflections competing for learners’ limited cognitive resources.