The processing of English which-questions in adult L2 learners: Effects of L1 transfer and proficiency

Abstract

Abstract:In a visual-world eye-tracking study, we investigate the on-line comprehension of subject and object which-questions in 60 German-English adult second-language (L2) learners at various stages of proficiency. In particular, we examine whether adult L2 learners follow the same acquisitional trajectories as children or whether L1 transfer dictates a different development. Previous research on monolingual English children shows that child learners initially commit to a strong subject preference and use inflectional cues, i.e. number marking, to overcome structural biases (e.g. Contemori and Marinis 2014b). The adult data on comprehension accuracy show strong effects of proficiency. Intermediate-proficiency L2 learners have an overwhelming structural preference for subject questions, and they are not sensitive to inflectional cues that disambiguate towards object readings. High-intermediate learners come to exploit inflectional cues for revising an initial subject-preference to the target object reading. Finally, advanced learners display native-like comprehension patterns. In contrast to the off-line accuracy data, the analysis of the eye movements shows that all groups of L2 adults make incremental use of inflectional cues in on-line comprehension.These findings indicate that inflectional cues are integrated in the course of L2 development in similar ways as in monolingual development. We discuss the results in the context of current approaches to L2 processing and childadult differences in language development.

Constructional Processing in a Second Language: The Role of Constructional Knowledge in Verb‐Construction Integration

“…Given the well‐attested role of L1 knowledge in L2 learning and processing (e.g., Hopp, ; Ortega, ; Weber & Cutler, ), it appears plausible to assume that the greater crosslinguistic variability in the resultative and ditransitive constructions relative to the caused motion construction may have affected the learners’ processing patterns for these constructions, providing an account for the processing variability across the constructions observed in our study. One possible scenario as an explanation of this outcome is that the resultative and ditransitive constructions may have caused some processing difficulties for the learners in both groups when they integrated verb‐ and construction‐based information, obscuring the expected group differences within the target sentence.…”

Similarity-based interference and relative clauses in second language processing

“…While such results illustrate the subject/object asymmetry in L2 comprehension, we are aware of only two studies that have examined how noun similarity influences L2 processing of the subject/object asymmetry. Though not testing RCs, Hopp (2017) examined the subject/object asymmetry in wh-questions as in (4a/b) and (4c/d) using the visual world paradigm. Similarity was also manipulated, such that the two nouns either mismatched (4a/c) or matched (4b/d) in number.…”

Syntactic development in early foreign language learning: Effects of L1 transfer, input, and individual factors

“…In contrast, the bilingual children mapped the case marking directly to the target (i.e., they chose a patient referent upon hearing accusative case and an agent referent for nominative case). Using the same stimuli as Contemori et al (2018), Hopp (2017) tested L1 German adult learners of English and found that intermediate learners show different interpretation and processing patterns than monolingual English children because the FL learners had difficulties using English morphosyntactic cues to assign an object interpretation. Taken together, these findings suggest that L1 effects may dictate a partially different course of development in sequential and late bilingual than in monolingual acquisition.…”

“…In L2 and FL acquisition, evidence of L1 syntactic transfer is abundant across learning contexts and across language combinations. For instance, L1 German child and adult learners of English initially transfer the underlying OV (object-verb) word order of German to the L2 (Weigl, 1999;see Sağin-Şimşek, 2006;Sánchez, 2011, for child L2A) and they continue to display persistent transfer of the German verb-second (V2) property in main clauses (Kaltenbacher, 2001;Rankin, 2012;Robertson & Sorace, 1999) as well as in wh-questions and relative clauses (Rankin, 2013(Rankin, , 2014; see also Hopp, 2017).…”

“…The development of questions and relative clauses has been much studied in monolingual child development (e.g., Durrleman, Marinis, & Franck, 2016) and is beginning to receive attention in child L2 acquisition (Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2016). Crucially, L1 transfer affects wh-questions and relative clauses in adult FL development (e.g., Grüter, 2006;Hopp, 2017;Rankin, 2014), making them suitable test cases for transfer effects in early FL syntactic development. In consequence, we examine whether the L1 affects early syntactic development in child FL acquisition in ways similar to what has been reported for adult FL acquisition.…”