Abstract
In English, the rule of agreement is quite simple: verbs must agree with their subject head nouns in terms of number features. Despite this simplicity, agreement processing is always interrupted when the subject phrase of the sentence “The key to the cabinets is on the table,” contains two nouns with a mismatch in number features commonly known as attraction effects. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether late advanced second language (L2) learners can acquire native-like sensitivity of attraction effects. The results revealed that L2 learners showed ERP patterns qualitatively similar to native English speakers: ungrammatical verbs following singular attractors elicited a P600 effect relative to their grammatical counterparts, whereas this positivity was replaced by an N400 effect when plural attractors intervened between the subject head nouns and the verbs. Of particular interest, given that, compared to native speakers, the amplitude of the P600 effect elicited by L2 learners was smaller, there was a quantitative difference between native speakers and L2 learners. We proposed that these two ERP components represented the two processing routes of agreement: the P600 effect indexed a full, combinatorial process, which parsed morphosyntactic features between agreement controllers and targets, whereas the N400 effect indexed a shallow, heuristic process, which evaluated lexical associations between agreeing elements. Moreover, similar to native speakers, advanced L2 learners showed an asymmetrical pattern of attraction effects, in that plural attractors were interfered with ungrammaticality at disagreeing verbs, but they did not cause any difficulties in processing grammatical sentences at agreeing verbs. The overall results suggested that compared to native processing, L2 processing of complex agreement with attractor interference was shallower and therefore late advanced L2 learners could not achieve native-like attraction effects.
Highlights
One of the major research questions of second language acquisition (SLA) concerns whether syntactic processing in late advanced second language (L2) learners may eventually become qualitatively similar to native language (L1) processing
According to the results, advanced L2 learners and native speakers exhibited qualitatively similar event-related potentials (ERPs) patterns to attraction manipulation in the processing of verbal agreement: relative to grammatical verbs, a P600 effect was found for ungrammatical verbs in the singular attractor condition, whereas this positivity was absent and instead an N400 effect was found in the plural attractor condition, showing a reliable interference effect of attraction
Our results showed that late L2 learners, with a high level of proficiency, exhibited qualitatively similar ERP patterns to attraction effects with native speakers: a P600 effect was elicited by ungrammatical verbs when the attractor was singular, and an N400 effect was elicited by incorrect verbs when the attractor was plural
Summary
One of the major research questions of second language acquisition (SLA) concerns whether syntactic processing in late advanced second language (L2) learners may eventually become qualitatively similar to native language (L1) processing. The shallow structure hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen and Felser, 2006a,b; Clahsen et al, 2010) is an SLA theory that makes a direct distinction between the simple grammatical rules and complex syntactic representations in L2 processing of syntax. The full parsing route or syntactic information is available to L2 learners in the computation of syntactic representations but it is weighted to be less in L2 processing compared to L1 Another misinterpretation of SSH is that shallow processing is specific to L2 learners. Clahsen and Felser (2006a) speculate that the limited use of grammatical knowledge may impede L2 parsing skills to determine whether or not L2 learners can develop a native-like processing of syntax depending on various factors such as the relative weighting of different information types, the exposure of L2 input, and proficiency
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