The processing of English which-questions in adult L2 learners: Effects of L1 transfer and proficiency

Abstract

Abstract In a visual-world eye-tracking study, we investigate the on-line comprehension of subject and object which-questions in 60 German-English adult second-language (L2) learners at various stages of proficiency. In particular, we examine whether adult L2 learners follow the same acquisitional trajectories as children or whether L1 transfer dictates a different development. Previous research on monolingual English children shows that child learners initially commit to a strong subject preference and use inflectional cues, i.e. number marking, to overcome structural biases (e.g. Contemori and Marinis 2014b). The adult data on comprehension accuracy show strong effects of proficiency. Intermediate-proficiency L2 learners have an overwhelming structural preference for subject questions, and they are not sensitive to inflectional cues that disambiguate towards object readings. High-intermediate learners come to exploit inflectional cues for revising an initial subject-preference to the target object reading. Finally, advanced learners display native-like comprehension patterns. In contrast to the off-line accuracy data, the analysis of the eye movements shows that all groups of L2 adults make incremental use of inflectional cues in on-line comprehension. These findings indicate that inflectional cues are integrated in the course of L2 development in similar ways as in monolingual development. We discuss the results in the context of current approaches to L2 processing and child-adult differences in language development.