Abstract

Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.

Highlights

  • Research investigating the existence of a critical period for language acquisition is prolific but controversial

  • We investigated the role of age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency on the processing of Spanish adjacent SV number agreement in third-person verbs, using a reading eye-tracking task with semantic judgments

  • This study investigated the effects of AoA and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing

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Summary

Introduction

Research investigating the existence of a critical period for language acquisition is prolific but controversial (see DeLuca et al 2019 for a review). Many studies investigating the role of age of acquisition (AoA) have focused on morphosyntactic phenomena because adult L2 learners have pervasive difficulties processing agreement relationships absent in their L1. These studies have a number of limitations. Representational deficit accounts claim that adults cannot acquire grammatical structures absent in their L1, due to maturational constraints in either L2 representation (Bley-Vroman 1989; Hawkins 2009; Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou 2007) or L2 computation (more reliance on lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information than grammatical information, Clahsen and Felser 2006, 2018; VanPatten 2015). Representational accessibility accounts argue that L2 difficulties are not age-related and that adults can acquire grammatical structures absent in their L1. L2 errors are attributed to representational difficulties with new morphology (McCarthy 2008) and morphosyntax (Lardiere 2005) or to computational deficiencies with marked morphology retrieval (Haznedar and Schwartz 1997; Prevost and White 2000), lexical access and retrieval (Hopp 2016), retrieval interference (Cunnings 2017), working memory (McDonald 2006), or prediction during L2 processing (Kaan 2014)

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