Abstract
Verbatim sentence recall is widely used to test the language competence of native and non-native speakers since it involves comprehension and production of connected speech. However, we assume that, to maintain surface information, sentence recall relies particularly on attentional resources, which differentially affects native and non-native speakers. Since even in near-natives language processing is less automatized than in native speakers, processing a sentence in a foreign language plus retaining its surface may result in a cognitive overload. We contrasted sentence recall performance of German native speakers with that of highly proficient non-natives. Non-natives recalled the sentences significantly poorer than the natives, but performed equally well on a cloze test. This implies that sentence recall underestimates the language competence of good non-native speakers in mixed groups with native speakers. The findings also suggest that theories of sentence recall need to consider both its linguistic and its attentional aspects.
Highlights
Verbatim sentence recall is a task widely used in tests of language proficiency in educational (e.g., Grimm, 2001; Fried, 2008) and clinical contexts (e.g., Meyers et al, 2000) because it discriminates well between good and less good performers (Grimm, 2001)
Verbatim sentence recall covers many aspects of language processing: it requires comprehension and production skills, and involves processing at phonological, lexical-semantic, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and propositional levels (e.g., Schweppe, 2006). It is used in psycholinguistic research for studying syntactic priming (e.g., Potter and Lombardi, 1998; Meijer and Fox Tree, 2003). In spite of these advantages, we suggest that the verbatim recall of sentences is not that good a measure for estimating differences in language competence between native and highly proficient non-native speakers, for sentence recall systematically underestimates language proficiency of these highly proficient L2 speakers
If language competence of proficient non-native speakers is evaluated based on verbatim sentence recall, it could be underestimated as compared to other tasks and as compared to native speakers whose language processing is more automatized
Summary
Verbatim sentence recall (or sentence repetition testing, Diller and Jordan-Diller, 2003) is a task widely used in tests of language proficiency in educational (e.g., Grimm, 2001; Fried, 2008) and clinical contexts (e.g., Meyers et al, 2000) because it discriminates well between good and less good performers (Grimm, 2001). Verbatim sentence recall covers many aspects of language processing: it requires comprehension and production skills, and involves processing at phonological, lexical-semantic, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and propositional levels (e.g., Schweppe, 2006). It is used in psycholinguistic research for studying syntactic priming (e.g., Potter and Lombardi, 1998; Meijer and Fox Tree, 2003). If language competence of (highly) proficient non-native speakers is evaluated based on verbatim sentence recall, it could be underestimated as compared to other tasks and as compared to native speakers whose language processing is more automatized. This should even be the case for non-native speakers with native-like proficiency in other linguistic tasks—so-termed near-natives—whose performance on sentence recall would be considerably poorer than that of natives
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