Gender and number processing in Chinese learners of Spanish – Evidence from Event Related Potentials

An ERP study on L2 syntax processing: When do learners fail?

“…The factors most commonly suggested in the literature as to why gender or other forms of grammatical processing might be problematic do not appear to explain these results. Proficiency clearly plays some role in native-likeness in general (Steinhauer et al, 2006; McLaughlin et al, 2010), but as we argue above, our learners were quite proficient, certainly comparable to those in other studies in which learners have shown P600 effects for gender (Tokowicz and MacWhinney, 2005; Frenck-Mestre et al, 2009; Gillon Dowens et al, 2010, 2011; Foucart and Frenck-Mestre, 2011, 2012; Loerts, 2012). Also, our proficiency measure does not correlate with the magnitude of the ERPs.…”

“…A set of studies investigating L2 processing of French suggests that English, German, and Spanish learners of French can show native-like ERP responses in the form of a P600 effect (Frenck-Mestre et al, 2009; Foucart and Frenck-Mestre, 2011, 2012). The same goes for English and Chinese learners of Spanish (Tokowicz and MacWhinney, 2005; Gillon Dowens et al, 2010, 2011). German and Polish learners of Dutch can also show a P600 in response to gender violations (Sabourin and Stowe, 2008; Loerts, 2012).…”

“…The participants in the Romance studies summarized above included learners with extensive formal training in their L2. In many of the studies there was no immersion (Tokowicz and MacWhinney, 2005; Gillon Dowens et al, 2011) or only minimal immersion during the participants' recent residence in France (Foucart and Frenck-Mestre, 2011, 2012). Sabourin and Stowe (2008), unlike Loerts, tested a similar late immersion population using visual materials, with each word presented consecutively in the center of the screen.…”

Brain signatures of early lexical and morphological learning of a new language

“…Furthermore, we chose one time window for the rule-generalization test (250-400 ms) to assess early positivity, and one for the control task (350-500 ms) to assess the N400 effect. These time-windows are within the expected time ranges of the N200 (Folstein & Van Petten, 2008;Nieuwenhuis, Yeung, & Cohen, 2004), the N400 (Frenzel et al, 2010;Morris & Holcomb, 2005;Proverbio & Riva, 2009; see Kutas & Federmeier, 2011 for review), and the P600 (Dowens et al, 2011;Frenzel et al, 2010;Mehravari, Tanner, Wampler, Valentine, & Osterhout, 2015;Morris & Holcomb, 2005) component, respectively. We used repeated measures analyses of variance to assess the effects of experimental conditions and electrode locations.…”

“…In other words, these results indicate that the participants employed regular rules of inflection in on-line morphological processing. There are also other studies that have found qualitatively similar ERP patterns of aspects of morphosyntactic processing in native speakers and highly proficient late L2 learners, with early negativity followed by P600 (Dowens et al, 2011).…”