Language processing research is changing in two ways that should make it more relevant to the study of grammatical learning. First, grammatical phenomena are re-entering the psycholinguistic fray, and we have learned a lot in recent years about the real-time deployment of grammatical knowledge. Second, psycholinguistics is reaching more diverse populations, leading to much research on language processing in child and adult learners. We discuss three ways that language processing can be used to understand language acquisition. Level 1 approaches (“Processing in learners”) explore well-known phenomena from the adult psycholinguistic literature and document how they play out in learner populations (child learners, adult learners, bilinguals). Level 2 approaches (“Learning effects as processing effects”) use insights from adult psycholinguistics to understand the language proficiency of learners. We argue that a rich body of findings that have been attributed to the grammatical development of anaphora should instead be attributed to limitations in the learner’s language processing system. Level 3 approaches (“Explaining learning via processing”) use language processing to understand what it takes to successfully master the grammar of a language, and why different learner groups are more or less successful. We examine whether language processing may explain why some grammatical phenomena are mastered late in children but not in adult learners. We discuss the idea that children’s language learning prowess is directly caused by their processing limitations (‘less is more’: Newport, 1990). We conclude that the idea is unlikely to be correct in its original form, but that a variant of the idea has some promise (‘less is eventually more’). We lay out key research questions that need to be addressed in order to resolve the issues addressed in the paper.

Analyzing L2 sentence processing in terms of cue-based memory retrieval is promising. But this useful general framework has yet to become a specific theory of L1-L2 differences.

Some aspects of an account of successful native language learning are non-negotiable. First, learners are unlikely to succeed if they cannot analyze the input correctly. Second, learners need to recognize discrepancies between their current grammar and the target language to progress to the appropriate endstate. Both requirements depend on an understanding of how learners process the language around them. In order to understand why other learner groups are less successful, it is useful to scrutinize the most successful learners, i.e., children: when and how do they succeed, and with what cognitive resources? We can then ask which of those mechanisms fall short in the less successful learners.

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In Swiss German, which encodes a phonological contrast in consonant length, consonant duration signals the segment’s geminate status and, in medial position, indicates the word’s syllable structure. The present work investigates the interaction between these aspects of durational processing using the N400, an electrophysiological component which offers a fine-grained measure of the success of lexical access. A cross-modal semantic priming ERP study tested to what extent words with medial consonants whose duration had been phonetically lengthened or shortened (leading to an incorrect syllable structure) trigger lexical access. Behavioural and ERP results revealed a processing asymmetry: lengthening a singleton does not negatively impact lexical access, but shortening a geminate does. This asymmetry supports an underspecification account of the geminate/singleton contrast, and may indicate a bias towards initially parsing acoustic input according to a CV template.