NUMBER ATTRACTION EFFECTS IN NEAR-NATIVE SPANISH SENTENCE COMPREHENSION. Issue 1 (29th October 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Jegerski, Jill
• Is Part Of: Studies in second language acquisition. Volume 38:Issue 1(2016)
• Page Start: 5
• Page End: 33
• Publication Date: 2014-10-29
• Subjects: Second language acquisition -- Periodicals; Language and languages -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; 401.9
• DOI: 10.1017/S027226311400059X
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0272-2631

Abstract

Abstract : Grammatical agreement phenomena such as verbal number have long been of fundamental interest in the study of second language (L2) acquisition. Previous research from the perspective of sentence processing has documented nativelike behavior among nonnative participants but has also relied almost exclusively on grammar violation paradigms. The present investigation examined the online comprehension of subject-verb number agreement by native and nonnative speakers of Mexican Spanish using the more subtle agreement attraction paradigm, with stimuli grammatical in both conditions, in addition to a nonlocal grammaticality paradigm. The results of a self-paced reading experiment confirmed that nonnatives can acquire nativelike online sensitivity to verbal number agreement, even without grammar errors, and that such sensitivity develops only at very high levels of L2 proficiency.