Streszczenie:
In this article we analyze the function of case endings in the Russian language by means of two linguistic experiments. In the first one we aim to discover how well Russian speakers living in Finland (native speakers and non-natives highly proficient in the language) understand which case or number a word belongs to when the correct word form is homophonous with at least one other form. The second experiment seeks to answer the question of whether native Russian speakers need case endings to be able to distinguish syntactic connections between words. The results of the first experiment show that the category of number is more developed than the category of case in the perception of the native speakers, while the second experiment suggests that in the event of case syncretism other factors influence the identification of syntactic connections between the words in a sentence.
