Two competing explanations exist regarding the nature of morphological difficulty in adult second language acquisition: competence deficit versus performance deficiency. This study tested these explanations by examining English as a second language (ESL) learners' morphological performance in reading comprehension tasks. Chinese ESL speakers were asked to read English sentences for comprehension in three self-paced word by word reading experiments. Their reading times were measured to determine if they were sensitive to idiosyncrasies/disagreement in sentences that do and do not involve the number morpheme. The results show that they are not sensitive to number disagreement, but sensitive to other idiosyncrasies tested. This insensitivity to the number morpheme suggests that their morphological knowledge is not an integrated part of their automatic second language competence.

This study examined the development of integrated knowledge or automatic competence in adult SLA. Automatic competence was operationalized in terms of the participants' sensitivity to grammatical errors in a self-paced reading task. Their sensitivity was determined by observing whether there was a delay in reading ungrammatical sentences. Native and nonnative speakers of English read grammatical and ungrammatical sentences that contained errors involving plural -s and verb subcategorization. Their reading times were measured and compared. The results showed that native speakers were sensitive to errors involving both structures, but nonnative speakers were only sensitive to errors involving verb subcategorization. The results confirmed that the development of second language automatic competence or integrated knowledge is selective. Alternative explanations of this selectivity are discussed.

This study investigated first language (L1) influence on the acquisition of second language (L2) collocations using a framework based on Kroll and Stewart (1994) and Jiang (2000), by comparing the performance on a phrase‐acceptability judgment task among native speakers of English, Japanese English as a second language (ESL) users, and Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The test materials included both congruent collocations, whose lexical components were similar in L1 and L2, and incongruent collocations, whose lexical components differed in the two languages. EFL learners made more errors with and reacted more slowly to incongruent collocations than congruent collocations. ESL users generally performed better than EFL learners (lower error rate and faster speed), but they still made more errors on incongruent collocations than on congruent collocations. Interestingly, however, the L1 effect was not apparent on the ESL users' reaction time. The results suggested that (a) both L1 congruency and L2 exposure affect the acquisition of L2 collocations with the availability of both maximizing this acquisition; (b) it is difficult to acquire incongruent collocations even with a considerable amount of exposure to L2; and (c) once stored in memory, L2 collocations are processed independently of L1. Possible differences in acquiring congruent and incongruent collocations are discussed.

Cross-language priming effects using masked primes tend to be asymmetrical. Priming from L1 to L2 is strong, but priming from L2 to L1 is inconsistent and weak. Two kinds of explanations may explain this asymmetry. The representation hypothesis attributes the asymmetry to the different strength of connections between lexical items in the two languages. The processing hypothesis explains the asymmetry by emphasizing differences in processing speed or the general activation level of the two languages. In this study, three versions of the processing hypothesis were examined. Chinese–English bilinguals were tested with a masked priming paradigm on Chinese–English translation pairs in five experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the asymmetrical pattern of cross-language priming. Experiments 3 to 5 examined three processing-related hypotheses by varying prime and target presentation conditions. The results showed that none of the three processing accounts provides a satisfactory explanation for the asymmetry. The findings are discussed in the context of current models of bilingual memory organization.

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