L2 Knowledge of the Obligatory French Subjunctive: Offline Measures and Eye Tracking Compared

Amber Dudley,Roumyana Slabakova

doi:10.3390/languages6010031

Abstract

Extensive research has shown that second language (L2) learners find it difficult to apply grammatical knowledge during real-time processing, especially when differences exist between the first (L1) and L2. The current study examines the extent to which British English-speaking learners of French can apply their grammatical knowledge of the French subjunctive during real-time processing, and whether this ability is modulated by the properties of the L1 grammar, and/or proficiency. Data from an acceptability judgment task and an eye-tracking during reading experiment revealed that L2 learners had knowledge of the subjunctive, but were unable to apply this knowledge when reading for comprehension. Such findings therefore suggest that L2 knowledge of the subjunctive, at least at the proficiency levels tested in this study, is largely metalinguistic (explicit) in nature and that reduced lexical access and/or limited computational resources (e.g., working memory) prevented learners from fully utilising their grammatical representations during real-time processing.

Highlights

The dynamic nature of morphosyntactic variation in both comprehension and production has been well documented in the field of second language (L2) acquisition and processing (Franceschina 2005; Grüter et al 2012; Hopp 2010; Keating 2009; Lardiere 1998, 2009; Slabakova 2018; Keating 2010)
Over the past two decades and in response to a substantial and ever-expanding body of experimental work, the field as a whole has proposed and subsequently refined numerous generatively grounded theories of second language acquisition. These theories have sought to elucidate the deterministic factors that contribute to L1–L2 differences in ultimate attainment that access to Universal Grammar (UG) alone cannot explain
Among the L2 speakers, we found a significant interaction between grammaticality and proficiency (β = 0.53, SE = 0.07, t = 7.29, p < 0.001), suggesting that their judgments became more categorical as a function of proficiency

Summary

Introduction

The dynamic nature of morphosyntactic variation in both comprehension and production has been well documented in the field of second language (L2) acquisition and processing (Franceschina 2005; Grüter et al 2012; Hopp 2010; Keating 2009; Lardiere 1998, 2009; Slabakova 2018; Keating 2010). Over the past two decades and in response to a substantial and ever-expanding body of experimental work, the field as a whole has proposed and subsequently refined numerous generatively grounded theories of second language acquisition. These theories have sought to elucidate the deterministic factors that contribute to L1–L2 differences in ultimate attainment that access to Universal Grammar (UG) alone cannot explain. The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) predicts that the initial state of L2 learners’ interlanguage grammar consists of “an entrenched system of morphosyntactic features already assembled into lexical items” The greater the difference between the L1 and the L2, the more challenging the acquisition task will be

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Conclusion