TY - JOUR
T1 - Number attraction effects in near-native spanish sentence comprehension
AU - Jegerski, Jill
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Cambridge University Press.
PY - 2014/10/6
Y1 - 2014/10/6
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84960471238&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1017/S027226311400059X
DO - 10.1017/S027226311400059X
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84960471238
SN - 0272-2631
VL - 77
SP - 5
EP - 33
JO - Studies in Second Language Acquisition
JF - Studies in Second Language Acquisition
IS - 3
ER -