Second language learners are not native speakers but they process some aspects of the syntax as if they were: Evidence from behavioral and ERP data

Rossi, E. , Gullifer, J. , Dussias, P. E. & Kroll, J. F.

The Pennsylvania State University

Some theories of second language (L2) processing (Clahsen & Felser, 2006) claim that late L2 learners never acquire full access to syntactic representations available to native (L1) speakers. Alternative theories account for differences between L2 and L1 processing in terms of reduced availability of cognitive resources in the L2 (McDonald, 2006).
To test these hypotheses we utilized a morpho-syntactic structure that differs between English and Spanish. Spanish clitic pronouns -SpCls- (but not English pronouns) are marked for gender and number and appear before a finite verb. In two experiments, we tested L1 Spanish speakers (Exp1: n=20; Exp2: n=20), and L1 English proficient L2 learners of Spanish (Exp1: n=20; Exp2: n=8).
Experiment 1: The on-line processing of SpCls (in the correct and incorrect position) was tested with a self-paced reading task. Results showed that L1 speakers produced longer RTs at the incorrect clitic site for singular masculine clitics. Other clitics elicited longer RTs on the following word. L2 learners showed an effect at the clitic site but no spillover effect, suggesting that L2 speakers are able to access the morpho-syntactic representation of clitics and exploit it to resolve ungrammaticality. However, cognitive constraints may limit their ability to use this information to make predictions about upcoming information.
Experiment 2: We used Event-Related Potentials to examine the real-time course of SpCl processing. Participants read sentences in which clitics varied in correctness for gender, number, or both. Initial results revealed that both L1 and L2 showed a larger positivity in the 500-700 ms window for the incorrect clitics suggesting sensitivity to the online processing of morphosyntactic information.
Taken together, these results suggest that there are not hard constraints preventing late bilinguals from accessing L2 grammatical information, but rather cognitive consequences of processing the non-native language distinguish the L2 users from native speakers.