Syntactic prediction in L2 learners: evidence from English disjunction processing

Abstract

This study examined the extent to which second language (L2) learners’ syntactic prediction resembles or differs from native speakers’ and the role of L2 proficiency in this process. An experimental group of 135 Chinese learners of English and a control group of 58 English native speakers participated in a phrase-by-phrase self-paced reading task where the experimental sentences were contrastive in whether the DP disjunction was preceded by either or not. To ensure that the participants had sufficient knowledge about the target stimuli, they were asked to additionally judge the acceptability of the experimental sentences. The results showed that like native speakers, L2 learners read the critical region consisting of “or” and a DP disjunct faster when it was preceded by either compared to when either was absent. In addition, this effect of the presence versus absence of either spilled over to the post-critical region. Moreover, L2 proficiency was not found to robustly modulate this process. It is concluded that L2 learners, like native speakers, can make predictions at the level of syntax.

Estimating reliability for response-time difference measures: Toward a standardized, model-based approach

“…This treatment was to remove completely unusable data and differed from the trimming procedure that seeks to rid the data sets of outliers. Although Fang and Wu (2022b) logarithmically transformed and residualized the RTs on the length of the region before their further analysis, we used the "raw" RTs in our analysis for consistency across the three data sets. As a sensitivity analysis, we confirmed that using the logged, residualized RTs did not change our conclusion.…”

“…Therefore, faster reading times can be expected when learners read a sentence containing formulaic language than a matched control version. For example, Fang and Wu (2022b) investigated Chinese learners' knowledge of the either-or construction in English. In an SPR task, participants read stimulus sentences such as Jay painted either | the big house | or the old car | for his family over the summer (p. 9), with or without either.…”

“…The first data set was shared by Fang and Wu (2022a), available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/abhjv/). The associated substantive publication was Fang and Wu (2022b).…”

“…The first data set was shared by Fang and Wu (2022a), available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/abhjv/). The associated substantive publication was Fang and Wu (2022b). The authors administered SPR and acceptability judgment tasks to investigate learners' (N = 122; 135 initially, 13 removed) knowledge of the either-or construction in English.…”

“…This is in part because they are believed to tap into the knowledge that is available for automatic processing, a fundamental basis for authentic language use (e.g., Elgort, 2011;Suzuki, 2017). Examples of such measures include word-monitoring tasks (Godfroid & Kim, 2021;Granena, 2013;Suzuki et al, 2022), self-paced reading (SPR) tasks (Fang & Wu, 2022b;Godfroid & Kim, 2021;Marsden et al, 2018), and judgment tasks in the priming paradigm (Elgort, 2011;Hui et al, 2022a;Plonsky et al, 2020). In data analysis, researchers using these measures typically focus on differences in RTs across experimental conditions.…”