ERPs reveal comparable syntactic sentence processing in native and non-native readers of English

Abstract

L2 syntactic processing has been primarily investigated in the context of syntactic anomaly detection, but only sparsely with syntactic ambiguity. In the field of event-related potentials (ERPs) syntactic anomaly detection and syntactic ambiguity resolution is linked to the P600. The current ERP experiment examined L2 syntactic processing in highly proficient L1 Spanish-L2 English readers who had acquired English informally around the age of 5 years. Temporary syntactic ambiguity (induced by verb subcategorization information) was tested as a language-specific phenomenon of L2, while syntactic anomaly resulted from phrase structure constraints that are similar in L1 and L2. Participants judged whether a sentence was syntactically acceptable or not. Native readers of English showed a P600 in the temporary syntactically ambiguous and syntactically anomalous sentences. A comparable picture emerged in the non-native readers of English. Both critical syntactic conditions elicited a P600, however, the distribution and latency of the P600 varied in the syntactic anomaly condition. The results clearly show that early acquisition of L2 syntactic knowledge leads to comparable online sensitivity towards temporal syntactic ambiguity and syntactic anomaly in early and highly proficient non-native readers of English and native readers of English.

Idiosyncratic Grammars: Syntactic Processing in Second Language Comprehension Uses Subjective Feature Representations

“…Some of the studies that chose not to exclude incorrectly judged sentences from their analysis assume that ERP data in L2 syntactic processing reflect some "implicit" syntactic knowledge even when "explicit" knowledge is absent, for example, when judgment performance is at or near chance level (Kotz et al, 2008;Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005). In contrast, a number of recent studies on L2 syntactic acquisition rather suggest a parallel course of behavioral and neural correlates of syntactic discrimination ability (Davidson & Indefrey, 2009, 2011.…”

“…Although these error rates are usually negligible in native speakers, L2 speakers are often much worse at judging whether a sentence is grammatical or not, raising the possibility of incorrect grammatical representations. For example, in a study by Kotz, Holcomb, and Osterhout (2008), early Spanish L2 speakers of English displayed accuracy rates in grammaticality judgments of only 56% on long sentences containing reduced relative clauses. As in other L2 studies (Pakulak & Neville, 2011;Chen et al, 2007;Ojima et al, 2005;Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005;Weber-Fox & Neville, 1996), sentences with correct and incorrect grammaticality judgments were grouped together in the analyses in that study.…”

Morphological priming resists language and modality switching in late Dutch-Brazilian Portuguese bilinguals

“…The authors took this to as a confirmation of the aforementioned claim that bilinguals process inflectional morphology different from derivational morphology. Factors that influence resemblance to native-like responses for N400 and P600 components are proficiency (TANNER et al, 2016), age of acquisition (KOTZ et al, 2008) and the degree of similarity of the tested syntactic property between L1 and L2 (DÍAZ et al 2016). In this study, we would expect reduced N400 amplitudes for targets in morphologically related pairs as compared to targets in unrelated word pairs.…”

“…ERP studies show that proficient L2 speakers tend to present similar neurophysiologic responses as native speakers of that language (KOTZ et al, 2008). The N400 component can appear in both less and more proficient L2 speakers.…”

A técnica de ERP no processamento de sentenças de crianças: uma revisão

“…FEDERMEIER, 2011;LAU;POEPPEL, 2008). Pesquisadores observaram o N400 em um número variado de tarefas que variam de priming de palavras e processamento no nível da mensagem até o papel da atenção e consciência na compreensão da linguagem, diferenças de ativação entre hemisférios ativados pela memória semântica, e a construção de vocabulário no aprendizado de uma língua (OSTERHOUT; MCLAUGHLIN, 2006;KOTZ;OSTERHOUT, 2008), só para mencionar alguns trabalhos. O N400 também já foi usado para comparar diferenças entre populações -e.g., jovens vs. idosos, sadios vs. pacientes esquizofrênicos (KUPERBERG et al, 2006).…”