This study investigates (1) whether late second language (L2) learners can attain nativelike knowledge of English plural inflection even when their first language (L1) lacks an equivalent and (2) whether they construct hierarchically structured representations during online sentence processing like native speakers. In a self-paced reading task, native English speakers and advanced Korean learners of English were tested on their (in)sensitivity to plural errors in two different structures. The results indicate that despite the L1-L2 difference, the learners were sensitive to plural errors in both structures, and that their sensitivity to the errors was affected by the structural distance of the featurechecking dependency related to plural inflection, like the native speakers' sensitivity. These findings suggest that (1) L2 learners can acquire target-like L2 inflection knowledge, even if such inflection is not present in their L1, contra the representational deficit account and that (2) they are sensitive to structural distance because they compute hierarchically structured representations during real-time language comprehension, contra the shallow structure hypothesis.

A cross-linguistic structural priming experiment explores the issue of whether parallel syntactic constructions of the two languages in bilinguals share a representation when the surface word orders of the constructions differ. The target population was early balanced bilinguals of Korean and English; the tested constructions were structures relevant to the subject-to-object raising (STOR) operation, which until this study have not been used for structural priming research in cross-linguistic contexts (e.g., STOR: Mary believes Jerry to be trustworthy; non-STOR: Mary believes that Jerry is trustworthy). These syntactic structures exist in both English and Korean, but with different surface word orders. The results show that cross-linguistic priming of the STOR construction occurred, suggesting that parallel syntactic constructions of the languages in bilinguals can share a representation independent of surface word order.

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The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 processing, L2 language processing generally underuses grammatical information, prioritizing nongrammatical information. Specifically, this cross-modal priming study tests SSH at the level of morphology, investigating whether late advanced L2 learners construct hierarchically structured representations for trimorphemic derived words during real-time processing as native speakers do. Our results support SSH. In lexical decision on English trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]), L1 recognition of the targets was facilitated by their bimorphemic morphological-structural constituent primes (e.g., unkind), but not by their bimorphemic nonconstituent primes (e.g., kindness), which were only semantically and formally related to the target. In contrast, L2 recognition was equally facilitated by both constituent and nonconstituent primes. These results suggest that unlike L1 processing, L2 processing of multimorphemic words is not mainly guided by detailed morphological structure, overrelying on nonstructural information.