Automatization in second language sentence processing: A partial, conceptual replication of Hulstijn, Van Gelderen, and Schoonen's 2009 study

Abstract

This study investigates the automatization of sentence processing using the coefficient of variation (CV), a measure of intraindividual processing stability (Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993). A smaller CV (i.e., standard deviation to reaction time [RT] ratio) and a positive CV-RT correlation are taken to index increased automatization. Hulstijn, Van Gelderen, and Schoonen (2009) were the first to try to validate the use of CV at the sentence level; however, they did not find any evidence for automatization in their CV analyses. Forty Korean English as a second language students (20 intermediate, 20 advanced) and 20 native speakers performed three speeded tasks in English: a semantic classification task, a sentence verification task, and a sentence construction task. The results revealed that, consistent with findings from previous word recognition studies, the CV in the sentence-level tasks decreased as participants' proficiency level increased. Although the CV-RT correlation in the sentence verification task was not always significant, no counterevidence against Segalowitz and Segalowitz' (1993) hypothesis was found. The sentence construction task discriminated better between groups than the sentence verification task. We argue that the CV may be a valid measure of automatization at the sentence level, provided the tasks used target lower-level processes such as word recognition, parsing, and semantic proposition formation.

Second language fluency and its underlying cognitive and social determinants

“…(For more recent discussion of RT and CV as predictors of L2 proficiency, see Ankerstein 2014, andLim andGodfroid 2014).…”

“…For example, in the task aimed at measuring lexical access (e. g., Segalowitz and Freed 2004), participants are simply asked to indicate whether boat refers to a living or nonliving object. In the task aimed at measuring sentence construction skill (Lim and Godfroid 2014), people have to indicate, for example, which word -does or he -best continues the sentence fragment I wonder what…. Moreover, while these cognitive tasks do have a receptive aspect -namely, the stimulus must be read -they nevertheless also possess a production aspect in that one must mentally generate a word's meaning or mentally construct a sentence or sentence fragment.…”

New directions and developments in defining, analyzing and measuring L2 speech fluency

“…In that study, the cognitive fluency measures were L2-specific (residualized against the L1) but the utterance fluency measures were not (L1 oral measures were not available). (For more recent discussion of RT and CV as predictors of L2 proficiency, see Ankerstein 2014, andLim andGodfroid 2014).…”

“…For example, in the task aimed at measuring lexical access (e.g., Segalowitz and Freed 2004), participants are simply asked to indicate whether boat refers to a living or nonliving object. In the task aimed at measuring sentence construction skill (Lim and Godfroid 2014), people have to indicate, for example, which word does or he best continues the sentence fragment I Moreover, while these cognitive tasks do have a receptive aspect namely, the stimulus must be read they nevertheless also possess a production aspect in that one must mentally generate a word's meaning or mentally construct a sentence or sentence fragment. Also, these tasks are relatively free of articulation demands (they do not require oral production) and therefore they overlap little in demand characteristics with the tasks yielding the utterance fluency data.…”

Priming Effect on Automatisation of L2 Prepositional-Phrase Processing Ability

“…The technical term "automatisation" has attracted the interest of many second language acquisition scholars as it is one of the key components for becoming a fluent language user (McLaughlin, 1987) and because developing fluency in the second language is the ultimate goal for L2 learners (Lim & Godfroid, 2014). However, compared with native speakers, most L2 learners lack an automatic representation of syntactic structures, which is one of the subcomponents considered to play a key role in sentence comprehension (Terauchi, 2010;Geba & Ryan, 1993).…”