Real-time psycholinguistic measures of communicative competence

This chapter presents the main methods that are commonly referred to in second language acquisition research as psycholinguistic: eyetracking with text, visual world eyetracking, self-paced reading, and event-related potentials (ERPs), and discusses three issues in current research. One is language processing in real time, which is critical to using a language for authentic communicative purposes but may present a particular challenge for second language learners. The second issue pertains to the compensatory strategies that learners may employ during processing, due to the aforementioned difficulty. The third issue is the application of grammatical knowledge in real-time processing. The chapter concludes with practical recommendations and possible future directions for this area of research.