Pronoun processing in anglophone late L2 learners of French: Behavioral and ERP evidence

German, Elisa Sneed; Herschensohn, Julia; Frenck-Mestre, Cheryl

doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2014.12.001

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(77 reference statements)

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“…Renaud (2011), for example, found that both intermediate and advanced anglophone learners of French were sensitive to gender violations in a self-paced reading task, even though only the advanced group explicitly rejected gender mismatched sentences offline. Furthermore, a similar mismatch between online and offline grammaticality judgments was uncovered in L2 French in a study of L2 French sentential position and morphological form of pronouns (German, Herschensohn, & Frenck-Mestre, 2015). Most of these studies, however, focused on L2 acquisition of Romance clitics, not strong pronouns.…”

Section: Possible L1 Transfer Effects and Previous L2 Researchmentioning

confidence: 79%

On the Role of Input in Second Language Acquisition: The Case of French Strong Pronouns

Shimanskaya

2018

Language Learning

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This study examined the acquisition of a linguistic property that is underrepresented in the input available to second language (L2) learners, namely, interpretation of French strong pronouns as [–animate]. To understand how pronouns are used and interpreted and how this topic is treated in pedagogical grammars, three types of analyses were conducted: corpus analysis, review of pedagogical materials, and experimental study with native and L2 speakers of French. Corpus data suggested that French strong pronouns were not inherently specified as [+animate] and that native speakers used these forms to refer to inanimate objects, at least when strong pronouns were used as objects of prepositions. Additionally, experimental data revealed that advanced L2 speakers also accepted inanimate interpretations. Taken together, the findings suggested that targetlike interpretation of pronouns can be acquired despite the scarcity of input, negative transfer from learners’ first language, and lack of explicit instruction of the target property.

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Section: Possible L1 Transfer Effects and Previous L2 Researchmentioning

confidence: 79%

On the Role of Input in Second Language Acquisition: The Case of French Strong Pronouns

Shimanskaya

2018

Language Learning

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“…In contrast, missing inflection approaches (Prévost and White 2000;Lardiere 2007) attribute morphological errors to other problems such as processing overload or prosodic difficulties. In any case, evidence from earlier studies indicates that mastery varies according to proficiency level: beginning learners of L2 French transfer from English in producing in situ pronouns, whereas intermediate learners show transitional responses, both behavioral and cortical, to ungrammatical in situ pronouns (Sneed German et al 2015).…”

Section: L2a Of Cliticsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Sneed German et al (2015) use both behavioral measures and event related potentials (ERPs) to investigate comprehension of object clitics by two groups of intermediate Anglophone learners of L2 French and native speakers. Event related potentials, which record electrophysiological cortical activity using scalp electrodes, have been used to determine reactions to language phenomena in real time, with temporal resolution to the millisecond (Friederici et al 1993;Hagoort and Brown 1999;Osterhout et al 2004Osterhout et al , 2006Steinhauer 2014).…”

Section: A I Drink My Tea With Creammentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The acquisition of L2 Romance pronouns has been a subject of investigation to test morphosyntactic transfer hypotheses (White 1996;Hawkins and Franceschina 2004;Granfeldt and Schlyter 2004;Arche and Domínguez 2011) in studies that indicate that mastery of clitic pronouns varies substantially according to proficiency level. 1 Beginning learners of L2 French clearly transfer English structures in producing in situ pronouns as in (2c) (Herschensohn 2000;Hawkins 2001), while intermediate proficiency learners show transitional responses, both behavioral and cortical, to ungrammatical in situ pronouns (Sneed German et al 2015). Little research has been done on advanced learners of L2 French with respect to object clitic pronouns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given extensive production data documenting Anglophone in situ L2 French pronouns, Sneed German et al (2015) From a prosodic perspective, strong pronouns are licit in a stressed PWd position (20b), but they are morphosyntactically ungrammatical. In contrast, the in situ clitics (20a) are both morphosyntacitcally and prosodically illicit.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of L2 French Object Pronouns by Advanced Anglophone Learners

Herschensohn

Gess

2018

Languages

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The role native language transfer plays in L2 acquisition raises the question of whether L1 constitutes a permanent representational deficit to mastery of the L2 morphosyntax and prosody or if it can eventually be overcome. Earlier research has shown that beginning and low intermediate Anglophone L2 French learners are insensitive to French morphosyntactic and prosodic constraints in using in situ pronouns transferred from the L1. The prosodic transfer hypothesis (PTH) proposes that native prosodic structures may be adapted to facilitate acquisition of L2 prosodic structure. Our study presents new evidence from three Anglophone advanced learners of L2 French that indicates ceiling performance for pronoun production (99% accuracy in 300 tokens over nine interviews) and grammaticality judgment (98% accuracy). This native-like performance demonstrates target French morphosyntax and prosody, built-as predicted by the PTH-by licensing pronominal free clitics in a new pre-verbal L2 position distinct from post-verbal L1. Furthermore, the learners' data confirms accurate prosody by way of appropriate prominence patterns in clitic + host sequences, correct use of clitics with prefixed verbs, use of stacked pronouns, as well as correct prosodic alternations involving liaison and elision. These results counter impaired representation approaches and suggest early missing inflection may be overcome.

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Electrophysiological Correlates of Second-Language Acquisition: From Words to Sentences

Caffarra

Carreiras

2023

Neuromethods

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Pronoun processing in anglophone late L2 learners of French: Behavioral and ERP evidence

Cited by 12 publications

References 49 publications

On the Role of Input in Second Language Acquisition: The Case of French Strong Pronouns

On the Role of Input in Second Language Acquisition: The Case of French Strong Pronouns

Acquisition of L2 French Object Pronouns by Advanced Anglophone Learners

Electrophysiological Correlates of Second-Language Acquisition: From Words to Sentences

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