Abstract
We investigated whether adult German native speakers and Dutch-speaking second-language learners of German exploit German regular verb morphology for predictive sentence processing and whether such predictive processing is moderated by working memory capacity and awareness of the predictive cue. In a picture-matching task with visual-world eye-tracking, the participants (first-language group: <em>n</em> = 31; second-language group: <em>n</em> = 30) saw two pictures of action scenes, varying in the number of referents depicted (singular versus plural). Simultaneously, they heard sentences in German in which the verb suffix represented the first reliable cue for grammatical number of the upcoming subject noun phrase. Successful exploitation of this number cue was measured as anticipatory button-press reaction times and eye-movements toward the correct picture, before subject onset. We found significant prediction effects in both the first-language and the second-language group, with anticipatory processing being somewhat faster in the native speakers than in the learners. Faster reaction times on prediction trials were associated with higher working memory scores. Debriefing interviews revealed that all participants had become aware that they could use the verb form predictively, adding further evidence that prediction can be a conscious process.
Highlights
As a fundamental element of human cognition, prediction plays an important role in language comprehension
Using visual-world eye-tracking, we investigated prediction in L1 and L2 speakers for a hitherto understudied grammatical structure, namely grammatical number encoded in German regular verb morphology
We compared prediction in advanced L2 learners and L1 speakers of German, expecting somewhat reduced prediction effects in the learners, and we explored the roles of working memory capacity and awareness in prediction
Summary
As a fundamental element of human cognition, prediction plays an important role in language comprehension. L1 listeners have been found to make predictions about upcoming information based on a vast range of linguistic cues (for reviews, see Huettig, 2015; Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Pickering & Gambi, 2018), such as word semantics or grammatical information (e.g., case or gender markings, verb tense). Such predictive processing appears to be further modulated by various individual differences, including vocabulary size (Rommers et al, 2015) and working memory capacity (Huettig & Janse, 2016). In several studies (e.g., Hopp, 2013; Hopp & Lemmerth, 2018), only learners with a near-native L2 mastery were found to exploit gender markings predictively
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