Number Attraction Effects in Near-Native Spanish Sentence Comprehension

Abstract

Grammatical agreement phenomena such as verbal number have long been of fundamental interest in the study of second language (L2) acquisition. Previous research from the perspective of sentence processing has documented nativelike behavior among nonnative participants but has also relied almost exclusively on grammar violation paradigms. The present investigation examined the online comprehension of subject-verb number agreement by native and nonnative speakers of Mexican Spanish using the more subtle agreement attraction paradigm, with stimuli grammatical in both conditions, in addition to a nonlocal grammaticality paradigm. The results of a selfpaced reading experiment confi rmed that nonnatives can acquire nativelike online sensitivity to verbal number agreement, even without grammar errors, and that such sensitivity develops only at very high levels of L2 profi ciency.

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

“…Consistent with previous work on agreement attraction that has identified an asymmetry between number features in determining agreement attraction (Bock & Miller 1991;Bock & Eberhard 1993;Vigliocco et al 1995;1996;Vigliocco & Nicol 1998;Bock et al 2001;Hartsuiker et al 2003;Alcocer & Phillips 2009;Bock et al 2012;Acuña-Fariña et al 2014;Jegerski 2016), we found that native speakers of Spanish exhibit clear effects of attraction for number: ungrammatical sentences with a singular NP1 but plural NP2 and ADJ were rated higher than other cases of ungrammaticality. Also consistent with the previous literature, we failed to find evidence of attraction for gender.…”

Sensitivity to syntactic violation and semantic ambiguity in English modal verbs: A self-paced reading study

“…However, incongruency, that is, ungrammaticality in the use of epistemic may, has slightly different consequences: as can be seen in the "Results" section, there was a significant interaction between congruency and segment with the start of reading slowdown on segment 3, which then continued on segment 4, with an effect at segment 5, just short of significance using the adjusted alpha value. This is in line with SPR studies that have investigated the impact of syntactic violations and ungrammaticality on readers' reaction times in milliseconds (e.g., Hopp, 2006Hopp, , 2016Jegerski, 2012Jegerski, , 2016Pliatsikas & Marinis, 2013). Support for the immediacy assumption is obtained here even more convincingly.…”

“…The current study used a SPR task because the SPR paradigm has been extensively exploited in research measuring native and nonnative sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations, syntactic or semantic ambiguity, and pragmatic plausibility (e.g., Hopp 2006Hopp , 2016Jegerski, 2012Jegerski, , 2016Marinis, 2003;Mifka-Profozic, 2017;Pliatsikas & Marinis, 2013;Roberts & Felser, 2011;Roberts & Liszka 2013, Stewart et al, 2009aTokowicz & Warren, 2010). Research on monolingual sentence processing has provided evidence that native speakers vary their reading times on a word-by-word basis and adjust their reading depending on the properties of each word such as the length, frequency, and/or word complexity (Just et al 1982;Keating & Jegerski, 2015).…”

“…The second assumption is related to the immediacy of reaction, suggesting that the interpretations at all levels of processing occur immediately after the problem has been encountered. Immediate longer reaction times, either on the target word or on the following word (spillover), have been recorded in studies that tested the processing of grammatical violations (e.g., Hopp, 2006;Jegerski, 2016;Pliatsikas & Marinis, 2013;Roberts & Liszka, 2013;Tokowicz & Warren, 2010).…”

A Meta-Analysis of Sensitivity to Grammatical Information During Self-Paced Reading: Towards a Framework of Reference for Reading Time Effect Sizes

“…We did not include reading time data from post-stimulus comprehension questions, as very few studies have done this (see, e.g.,Jegerski, 2016).8 This included obligatory and optional instantiation. Coding decisions were uncontroversial except in the case of one featureplural number markingin four studies, which we specify here: We considered plural number marking to be cross-linguistically different for Chinese learners inChan (2012) andJiang (2004Jiang ( , 2007, and for Japanese learners inJiang et al (2011).…”