Research in Second Language Acquisition and Interlanguage Pragmatics has shown that learners often have trouble acquiring the cultural features of a language, especially features for which there is no parallel distinction in their native language. For English-speaking learners of Russian, the acquisition of the formal and informal 'you' or the tu-vous distinction, is particularly problematic.

In Russian, the pronoun ty, corresponding roughly to the French tu, is used primarily with intimates, while the pronoun Vy, similar to the French vous, is used with strangers and in situations requiring deference. These categories are not static, but dynamic, and speakers often manipulate them for effect - consider the spouse who temporarily switches to Vy in an argument with her husband to underscore her frustration, or the employer who uses ty with an employee to indicate disdain. These switches can also be permanent, such as when acquaintances become friends. The use of the pronouns provides important information about the nature of the relationship between interlocutors.

This study examines the degree to which English-speaking learners of Russian are able to perceive the sociocultural information contained in the pronouns when listening to clips from authentic Russian films in which a pronoun switch occurs. On a written test designed to gauge their metapragmatic understanding of the feature, learners overall performed very well, indicating that they do in fact understand the distinction inherent in the pronouns. However, in a listening task, students often miss out on this information. On both tasks performance was consistent across proficiency levels according to statistical analysis. Pedagogical implications from the results of this study indicate that students can be taught the basic distinction, but that this information does not necessarily translate into success when listening. It may be necessary to explicitly teach students how to listen for pragmatic information in the classroom.