Journal ArticleDOI
Grammatical Processing in Language Learners.
Harald Clahsen,Claudia Felser +1 more
TLDR
This paper conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language learners] as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax).Abstract:
The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language [L2] learners) as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax). This article presents an overview of the results from this project and of other previous studies, with the aim of explaining how grammatical processing in language learners differs from that of mature native speakers. For child L1 processing, we will argue for a continuity hypothesis claiming that the child's parsing mechanism is basically the same as that of mature speakers and does not change over time. Instead, empirical differences between child and mature speaker's processing can be explained by other factors such as the child's limited working memory capacity and by less efficient lexical retrieval. In nonnative (adult L2) language processing, some striking differences to native speakers were observed in the domain of sentence processing. Adult learners are guided by lexical–semantic cues during parsing in the same way as native speakers, but less so by syntactic information. We suggest that the observed L1/L2 differences can be explained by assuming that the syntactic representations adult L2 learners compute during comprehension are shallower and less detailed than those of native speakers.read more
Citations
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An ERP study on L2 syntax processing: When do learners fail?
Nienke Meulman,Laurie A. Stowe,Simone Sprenger,Moniek Bresser,Monika S. Schmid,Monika S. Schmid +5 more
TL;DR: The results confirm the persistent problems of Romance learners of Dutch with online gender processing and show that they cannot be overcome by reducing task demands related to the modality of stimulus presentation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Second language acquisition.
TL;DR: The review details the theoretical stance of the two different approaches to the nature of language: generative linguistics and general cognitive approaches and some results of key acquisition studies from the two theoretical frameworks are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism
TL;DR: This paper selectively reviews the research on the Interface Hypothesis, addressing some common misinterpretations and outlining the most recent interdisciplinary developments.
Journal ArticleDOI
Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian
TL;DR: The authors presented data from an experiment on the interpretation of intrasentential anaphora in Italian by native Italian speakers and by English speakers who have learned Italian as adults and reached a near-native level of proficiency in this language.
Journal ArticleDOI
Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition
Judith F. Kroll,Ellen Bialystok +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that the tendency to consider bilingualism as a unitary phenomenon explained in terms of simple component processes has created a set of apparent controversies that masks the richness of the central finding in this work: the adult mind and brain are open to experience in ways that create profound consequences for both language and cognition.
References
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Individual differences in working memory and reading
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Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies
TL;DR: The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including the lower complexity of subject-extraction relative clauses compared to object-extracted relative clauses.
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Handbook of second language acquisition
William C. Ritchie,Tej K. Bhatia +1 more
TL;DR: This review concludes that the current state of second language acquisition in the United States is likely to be worse than in previous years, due to the combination of language barriers and the high level of adoption of English as a second language.
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Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing.
TL;DR: This review argues that sentence processing is supported by a temporo-frontal network, within this network, temporal regions subserve aspects of identification and frontal regions the building of syntactic and semantic relations.