Susceptibility to interference: underlying mechanisms, and implications for prediction

Abstract

Over the years, models proposed for second-language (L2) processing have been remarkably parallel to those proposed for Broca's aphasia. Differences between agrammatic and unaffected language processing have been explained, e.g., in terms of lack of detailed syntactic structure building (Grodzinsky, 1995), resource deficits (Haarman, Just & Carpenter, 1997), slow syntactic processing (Burkhardt, Avrutin, Piñango & Ruigendijk, 2008), or slowed lexical access (Love, Swinney, Walenski & Zurif, 2008). Each of these approaches have their homolog in L2 processing (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006; McDonald, 2006; Dekydtspotter, Schwartz & Sprouse, 2006; Hopp, 2013, respectively). It is therefore not surprising that Cunnings's proposal (Cunnings, 2016) parallels another idea in aphasia and aging research, namely that deviations from healthy young adult monolingual sentence processing can be attributed to an increased susceptibility to interference (e.g., Sheppard, Walenski, Love & Shapiro, 2015).

Memory retrieval and sentence processing: Differences between native and non-native speakers

“…Many commentators applaud Cunnings’ attempt to derive the specifics of non-native sentence comprehension from difficulties in cue-based memory retrieval. At the same time, however, commentators are concerned that Cunnings’ account may not be explicit enough (Malko, Ehrenhofer & Phillips, 2017; Tremblay & Coughlin, 2017; Kaan, 2017) and in some cases may go beyond what is currently supported by empirical evidence (Dillon, 2017), that core notions may be too vague and in need of clarification (Juffs, 2017; Gabriele, Fiorentino & Covey, 2017), and that attested L1/L2 differences remain that are hard to explain in terms of interference and retrieval difficulties (Jacob, Lago & Patterson, 2017). Experts in bilingualism raise methodological concerns and draw attention to factors neglected by Cunnings, such as the potential influence of an L2 on an individual's skills in the L1 (Dussias, Beatty-Martínez & Perrotti, 2017) and the role of individual differences (Montrul & Tanner, 2017; Hopp, 2017; Keating, 2017).…”