. Second language processing: when are first and second languages processed similarly?.

International audienceIn this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch coming from a historically similar system. The Romance languages have grammatical gender; however, the system is not congruent to the Dutch system. English does not have grammatical gender (although semantic gender is marked in the pronoun system). Experiment 1, a simple gender assignment task, showed that all L2 participants tested could assign the correct gender to Dutch nouns (all L2 groups performing on average above 80%), although having gender in the L1 did correlate with higher accuracy, particularly when the gender systems were very similar. Effects of noun familiarity and a default gender strategy were found for all participants. In Experiment 2 agreement between the noun and the relative pronoun was investigated. In this task a distinct performance hierarchy was found with the German group performing the best (though significantly worse than native speakers), the Romance group performing well above chance (though not as well as the German group), and the English group performing at chance. These results show that L2 acquisition of grammatical gender is affected more by the morphological similarity of gender marking in the L1 and L2 than by the presence of abstract syntactic gender features in the L1

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Current sentence processing research has focused on early effects of the on-line incremental processes that are performed at each word or constituent during processing. However, less attention has been devoted to what happens at the end of the clause or sentence. More specifically, over the last decade and a half, a lot of effort has been put into avoiding measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at the final word of a sentence, because of the possible effects of sentence wrap-up. This article reviews the evidence on how and when sentence wrap-up impacts behavioral and ERP results. Even though the end of the sentence is associated with a positive-going ERP wave, thus far this effect has not been associated with any factors hypothesized to affect wrap-up. In addition, ERP responses to violations have not been affected by this positivity. "Sentence-final" negativities reported in the literature are not unique to sentence final positions, nor do they obscure or distort ERP effects associated with linguistic manipulations. Finally, the empirical evidence used to argue that sentence-final ERPs are different from those recorded at sentence-medial positions is weak at most. Measuring ERPs at sentence-final positions is therefore certainly not to be avoided at all costs, especially not in cases where the structure of the language under investigation requires it. More importantly, researchers should follow rigorous method in their experimental design, avoid decision tasks which may induce ERP confounds, and ensure all other possible explanations for results are considered. Although this article is directed at a particular dogma from a particular literature, this review shows that it is important to reassess what is regarded as "general knowledge" from time to time.