Proficiency and working memory based explanations for nonnative speakers’ sensitivity to agreement in sentence processing

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8908430&fileId=S0142716411000890This study examines the roles of proficiency and working memory (WM) capacity in second-/foreign-language (L2) learners’ processing of agreement morphology. It investigates the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical short- and long-distance number agreement dependencies by native English speakers at two proficiencies in French, and the relationship between their proficiency and WM capacity in French and their sensitivity to agreement violations. Native English speakers at mid- and high proficiencies in French and native French speakers completed an acceptability judgment task, a self-paced reading task, and a WM task in French, and the English speakers also completed a WM task in English. The results showed that whereas all participants performed at ceiling on the acceptability judgment tasks, only the high-level L2 learners and native speakers showed some sensitivity to number agreement violations. For L2 learners, this sensitivity did not vary as a function of the length of the agreement dependency. The results also indicated that L2 learners tended to be more sensitive to agreement violations as their WM memory capacity in French increased. The implications of these results for theories of L2 morphological processing are discussed

Processing morphologically complex words in native and non-native French

This dissertation investigates how individuals who learned French after childhood process inflected French verbs. Two experiments test the hypothesis that non-native speakers lack the grammatical representation responsible for processing inflection in the manner that native speakers are able to. Experiment 1 uses a masked priming lexical decision task to test if native and non-native French speakers are able to decompose inflected words into stem and affix, and access a morphological level of representation in the lexicon. Experiment 2 uses the same task as Experiment 1, but incorporates electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the time-course of lexical access in native and non-native French speakers. The results of both Experiment 1 and 2 indicate that non-native French speakers process inflectional information in a qualitatively similar way as native speakers. Additionally, the ability to process inflection in a native-like way is not restricted to learners at higher levels of proficiency; morphological processing is found across a wide range of proficiency levels. The results of the two experiments suggest that the grammatical representations and brain mechanisms responsible for processing inflection are available to adult second language learners, and may be available even in the early stages of acquisition

An eye-tracking study examining the role of question-answer congruency in children’s comprehension of only: A preliminary report

‘Crain’s puzzle’ is a term that has been used to describe children’s difficulty comprehending the focus operator only when it is in subject position (subject-only), showing a tendency to interpret only as if it preceded the verb phrase instead. While some researchers attribute children’s difficulty to impoverished pragmatics in the discourse (Hackl et al., 2015), others argue that children’s grammar fundamentally differs from adults’ Notley et al. (2009), yielding a debate regarding whether children’s misinterpretation reflects a non-adult-like linguistic representation of only or some computational burden on their processing of meaning. This study addresses this debate by using eye-tracking to examine whether pragmatic felicity guides children’s eye-movements to incorporate the necessary information during processing on par with adults. Following Hackl et al. (2015), we experimentally manipulated whether the prompt question preceding the target sentence is pragmatically congruent or incongruent in felicitously introducing the only-statement in terms of which element in the sentence is focused by only. Emerging findings reveal that pragmatic richness in the discourse affected processing in both adults and children in a condition that was logically false. Results thus far provide support for an account which posits an important role for pragmatics

Working memory capacity in L2 processing

In this paper, we review the current state of the second language (L2) processing literature and report data suggesting that this subfield should now turn its attention to working memory capacity as an important factor modulating the possibility of (near)-native-like L2 processing. We first review three major overarching accounts of L2 processing (Clahsen et al. 2006a, Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics 27. 3–42; Ullman 2001, The declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 30. 37–69; McDonald 2006, Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. Journal of Memory and Language 55. 381–401; Hopp 2006, Syntactic features and reanalysis in near-native processing. Second Language Research 22. 369–397, and Hopp 2010, Ultimate attainment in L2 inflection: Performance similarities between non-native and native speakers. Lingua 120. 901–931) and frame their predictions in terms of the qualitative and quantitative differences in processing expected between native speakers and L2 learners. We next review event-related potential (ERP) research on L2 processing and argue that the field’s current understanding of qualitative and quantitative differences in ERPs warrants an additional focus on variables other than L2 proficiency that can also predict individual differences in L2 processing. Recent L2 research (relying on ERPs, self-paced reading, and other online measures) suggests that the most promising such variable is working memory (WM) capacity. We summarize results from our recent L2 WM studies – and report new ERP findings – that point to the possibility of a modulatory effect of WM capacity on the nativelikeness of L2 processing. We conclude that the study of WM capacity is the logical next step for this L2 processing subfield

Effects of the Native Language on the Learning of Fundamental Frequency in Second-Language Speech Segmentation

This study investigates whether the learning of prosodic cues to word boundaries in speech segmentation is more difficult if the native and second/foreign languages (L1 and L2) have similar (though non-identical) prosodies than if they have markedly different prosodies (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis). It does so by comparing French, Korean, and English listeners’ use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. F0 rise signals phrase-final boundaries in French and Korean but word-initial boundaries in English. Korean-speaking and English speaking L2 learners of French, who were matched in their French proficiency and French experience, and native French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they recognized words whose final boundary was or was not cued by an increase in F0. The results showed that Korean listeners had greater difficulty using F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French than French and English listeners. This suggests that L1–L2 prosodic similarity can make the learning of an L2 segmentation cue difficult, in line with the proposed Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis. We consider mechanisms that may underlie this difficulty and discuss the implications of our findings for understanding listeners’ phonological encoding of L2 words

Differential contribution of prosodic cues in the native and non-native segmentation of French speech

This is the published version, also available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lp-2012-0018.This study investigates the use of prosodic information in the segmentation of French speech by mid-level and high-level English second/foreign language (L2) learners of French and native French listeners. The results of two word-monitoring tasks, one with natural stimuli and one with resynthesized stimuli, show that as L2 learners become more proficient in French, they go from parsing accented syllables as word-initial to parsing them as word-final, but unlike native listeners, they use duration increase but not fundamental frequencyx (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries. These results are attributed to: (1) the L2 learners' native language, in which F0 rise is a reliable cue to word-initial boundaries but not word-final boundaries; (2) the co-occurrence of F0 and duration cues in word-final syllables in French, rendering L2 learners' use of F0 rise unnecessary for locating word-final boundaries; and (3) the optional marking of word-initial boundaries by F0 cues in French, thus making it difficult for non-native listeners to tease the two types of F0 rise apart. We argue that these factors prevent English listeners from attending to F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French, irrespective of their proficiency in French

Sensitivity to Inflectional Morphology in a Non-native Language: Evidence From ERPs

The extent to which non-native speakers are sensitive to morphological structure during language processing remains a matter of debate. The present study used a masked-priming lexical decision task with simultaneous electroencephalographic (EEG) recording to investigate whether native and non-native speakers of French yield similar or different behavioral and brain-level responses to inflected verbs. The results from reaction time and EEG analyses indicate that both native and non-native French speakers were indeed sensitive to morphological structure, and that this sensitivity cannot be explained simply by the presence of orthographic or semantic overlap between prime and target. Moreover, sensitivity to morphological structure in non-native speakers was not influenced by proficiency (as reflected by the N400); lower-level learners show similar sensitivity at the word level as very advanced learners. These results demonstrate that native-like processing of inflectional morphology is possible in adult learners, even at lower levels of proficiency, which runs counter to proposals suggesting that native-like processing of inflection is beyond non-native speakers' reach

Dissociating morphological and form priming with novel complex word primes: Evidence from masked priming, overt priming, and event-related potentials

Recent research suggests that visually-presented words are initially morphologically segmented whenever the letter-string can be exhaustively assigned to existing morphological representations, but not when an exhaustive parse is unavailable; e.g., priming is observed for both hunter→HUNT and brother →BROTH, but not for brothel→BROTH. Few studies have investigated whether this pattern extends to novel complex words, and the results to date (all from novel suffixed words) are mixed. In the current study, we examine whether novel compounds (drugrack→RACK) yield morphological priming which is dissociable from that in novel pseudoembedded words (slegrack→RACK). Using masked priming, we find significant and comparable priming in reaction times for word-final elements of both novel compounds and novel pseudoembedded words. Using overt priming, however, we find greater priming effects (in both reaction times and N400 amplitudes) for novel compounds compared to novel pseudoembedded words. These results are consistent with models assuming across-the-board activation of putative constituents, while also suggesting that morpheme activation may persevere despite the lack of an exhaustive morpheme-based parse when an exhaustive monomorphemic analysis is also unavailable. These findings highlight the critical role of the lexical status of the pseudoembedded prime in dissociating morphological and orthographic priming