Can late L2 learners acquire new grammatical features? Evidence from ERPs and eye-tracking

Abstract

We report a series of ERP and eye-tracking experiments investigating, (a) whether English–French learners can process grammatical gender online, (b) whether cross-linguistic similarities influence this ability, and (c) whether the syntactic distance between elements affects agreement processing. To address these questions we visually presented sentences which were either grammatically correct or contained noun–adjective gender agreement violations. In response to violations between the noun and a post-posed adjective (the canonical structure in French), both groups revealed a P600 effect. In contrast, violations between the noun and a pre-posed adjective (a less frequent order) triggered a P600 in French speakers but an N400 in L2 learners (implying that learners have not yet fully acquired native-like processing for pre-posed adjectives). Violations between the noun and the predicative adjective showed different effects for the native (P600) and non-native (no effect) groups with ERPs, but a similar pattern with eye-tracking. Overall, these results suggest that late L2 learners can acquire and process new features.