Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners

Late L2ers can acquire grammatical features that do not occur in their L1: Evidence from the effect of animacy on verb agreement in L1 Chinese

“…For some language researchers, this inflectional difficulty is in line with the view that the acquisition of L2 morphology and syntax is constrained by a critical period that precludes attaining native proficiency in grammatical features present in the L2 but absent in the L1 (e.g., Hawkins, 2000Hawkins, , 2001Hawkins & Chan, 1997;Hawkins & Liszka, 2003). However, other researchers attribute grammatical deviance in even proficient L2ers to resource limitations rather than to deficient mental representations for the L2 grammatical features (e.g., McDonald, 2006;Miyake & Friedman, 1998;Prévost & White, 2000). The present work is an examination of whether online difficulty with verb number agreement in L1-Chinese L2ers reflects biological constraints on acquiring grammatical features that are not instantiated in the L1, or whether late L2ers may possess these features, but cannot always gain access to them when the task demands are high.…”

“…Prévost and White (2000;White, 2010) attributed the omission of obligatory inflections on English verbs (i.e., past tense -ed and third person singular -s) to temporary difficulty accessing representations for the inflections during communication pressure. McDonald (2006) ascribed grammatical deficiency to limitations of L2 resources, and reported a significant correlation between reaction times on an auditory grammaticality judgment task and verbal working memory in late L2ers from a variety of L1s. She further demonstrated that natives responded to the grammaticality test like L2ers under conditions intended to stress processing resources (white noise, memory load, and compressed speech).…”

Working memory capacity in L2 processing

“…In Section 2, we review three major overarching accounts of L2 processing (Clahsen et al 2006a;Ullman 2001;McDonald 2006;Hopp 2006;Hopp 2010) and frame their predictions in terms of the qualitative and quantitative differences in processing expected between native speakers and L2 learners. Section 3 reviews the ERP research on L2 processing and argues that the field's current understanding of qualitative and quantitative differences in ERPs warrants an additional focus on variables other than L2 proficiency that might also predict individual differences in L2 processing.…”

Introduction

“…D'après la théorie du traitement cognitif non linguistique de McDonald (2006), les différences observées découlent plutôt des déficits computationnels chez les apprenants L2 dus à des capacités de mémoire de travail et de traitement de l'input auditif réduites, de même qu'à une vitesse de traitement inférieure. Par contraste, à la différence des deux autres théories pour lesquelles il s'agit de limitations mnémoniques ou computationnelles, selon l'hypothèse de structure de surface de Clahsen et Felser (2006), les différences entre les locuteurs natifs et non natifs sont attribuables aux types de représentations employées -lexico-sémantiques ou pragmatiques chez ceux-ci versus syntaxiques chez ceux-là.…”