The current study examined speakers’ performance in identifying syntactic and pragmatic violations of definiteness use across four types of tasks: (1) a reading acceptability judgment task, (2) an auditory acceptability judgment task, (3) an online self-paced reading task, and (4) an online self-paced listening task. This investigation aimed to clarify how methodological differences and similarities within psycholinguistic research might influence linguistic performance in adult speakers. The four experiments focused on pragmatic and syntactic violations of definiteness in Hebrew in both subject and object positions. Overall, participants detected definiteness violations across different modalities and tasks, but notable differences emerged among the tasks. For instance, in the self-paced listening task, sentences with no violations and those with pragmatic violations were indistinguishable, while slower response times were observed exclusively for syntactic violations in the object position. These performance variations may stem from the phonological reduction of the definite article in spoken Hebrew, coupled with online measurement methods that may have led to shallower processing and an increased likelihood of violation overlooking. Alternatively, participants in the online self-paced reading task exhibited the strongest effects in identifying both syntactic and pragmatic violations, indicating that task type and stimulus representation can significantly influence linguistic performance.

This study investigates L2 learners’ sensitivity to conventional and unconventional dative constructions in English. Experiment 1 focused on measuring EFL learners’ acceptability judgment and real-time processing of sentences containing both types of constructions. Experiment 2, involving ESL learners, aimed to explore the modulating effects of L2 learning contexts and proficiency. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that EFL learners demonstrated diminished sensitivity compared to L1 English speakers, both in acceptability judgment and self-paced reading, with L2 proficiency marginally affecting their performance. In Experiment 2, ESL learners exhibited sentence judgment and processing patterns akin to those of L1 speakers, with L2 proficiency influencing their acceptability judgment and not self-paced reading. These findings support the claim that while L2 learners have a reduced ability to take advantage of statistical preemption, this ability can improve with increased language experience. Crucially, our study extends this theoretical perspective to the domain of real-time sentence processing.

Prediction is a crucial mechanism of language comprehension. Our research question asked whether learners of Spanish were capable of using word order cues to predict the semantic class of the upcoming verb, and how this ability develops with proficiency. To answer this question, we conducted a self-paced reading study with three L2 Spanish groups at different proficiency levels and one native control group. Among the advanced L2 learners and native speakers, we found that reading times increased after the verb appeared in a word order not strongly associated with its semantic class. Because the only cue to the sentences’ word order was the presence or absence of the object marker a before the first noun, we suggest that these groups use this morphosyntactic cue to anticipate the semantic class of the upcoming verb. However, this pattern of processing behavior was not detected in our less experienced L2 groups.

This study investigated how second language (L2) learners process the Korean numeral quantifier construction by using transferable and nontransferable information. For Chinese-speaking learners of Korean (Chinese group), agreement between an honorific numeral quantifier and a noun in Korean constitutes transferable information in the canonical structure and nontransferable L2-specific information in the scrambled structure. For Japanese-speaking learners of Korean (Japanese group), this information gives rise to crosslinguistic conflicts in both structures. The results from a self-paced reading task showed that the Japanese group did not exhibit sensitivity to grammatical errors in both structures, whereas the Chinese group detected the agreement violation in the canonical but not in the scrambled structure. When a context sentence was provided to license scrambling in the test sentence, however, another group of Chinese-speaking learners of Korean showed sensitivity to the violation. These findings suggest varying degrees of crosslinguistic influence in L2 sentence processing.

A subset of German control verbs allows for the discontinuous linearization of their infinitival complements, a word-order pattern known as the “third construction” pattern. Compared to alternative word-order options (notably, extraposition), third constructions are very rare in present-day German. Here we ask whether the third construction pattern’s low occurrence frequency can be accounted for by processing factors. We report the results from a self-paced reading task and a production priming task investigating whether third constructions are difficult to comprehend, difficult to produce, or both. Our results show that the third construction pattern’s local structural ambiguity impedes comprehension, and that the pattern is also resistant to priming. We conclude that this word-order pattern is an example of a “latent” construction that is grammatically licensed but strongly dispreferred in language use because easier-to-process word-order variants are available.

Studies on sentence processing in inflectional languages support that syntactic structure building functionally precedes semantic processing. Conversely, most EEG studies of Chinese sentence processing do not support the priority of syntax. One possible explanation is that the Chinese language lacks morphological inflections. Another explanation may be that the presentation of separate sentence components on individual screens in EEG studies disrupts syntactic framework construction during sentence reading. The present study investigated this explanation using a self-paced reading experiment mimicking rapid serial visual presentation in EEG studies and an eye-tracking experiment reflecting natural reading. In both experiments, Chinese ‘ba’ sentences were presented to Chinese young adults in four conditions that differed across the dimensions of syntactic and semantic congruency. Evidence supporting the functional priority of syntax over semantics was limited to only the natural reading context, in which syntactic violations blocked the processing of semantics. Additionally, we observed a later stage of integrating plausible semantics with a failed syntax. Together, our findings extend the functional priority of syntax to the Chinese language and highlight the importance of adopting more ecologically valid methods when investigating sentence reading.

This study investigates whether child second language (L2) learners can use syntactic information during the processing of sentences involving unbounded dependencies and how their processing patterns compare to those of child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. Through a self-paced reading experiment involving the numeral quantifier (NQ) construction in Korean, we tested participants’ sensitivity to agreement violations between a noun phrase (NP) and an NQ in local and nonlocal conditions. The results showed that a subset of child L2 learners who demonstrated target-like knowledge of NP-NQ agreement in an offline task spent a longer processing time in the NP-NQ mismatch than in the NP-NQ match condition, in both local and nonlocal contexts. These child L2 learners’ processing patterns were comparable to those observed in child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. These findings suggest that child and adult L2 learners rely on the same system of syntactic representations and processing mechanisms that guide first language processing.

Heritage speakers—bilinguals who acquire minority languages naturalistically in infancy but are typically majority-language-dominant in adulthood—generally acquire grammars that differ systematically from the baseline input received in childhood. Yet not all areas diverge equally; understanding what characterizes divergence or resilience of a given feature is crucial to understanding heritage language acquisition. In this realm, we investigate the discourse-conditioned non-canonical word orders that mark information focus in Spanish. Focus bears the hallmarks of structures that diverge from the baseline, yet the evidence is mixed. We use an offline forced-choice task and an online self-paced reading task to compare heritage speakers’ judgments and processing to the baseline’s, and we find, echoing recent work, that the heritage speakers largely resemble baseline speakers. We interpret this convergence with reference to seven factors potentially affecting heritage language acquisition and identify one hypothesis—that focus facilitates processing due to its structural and pragmatic salience—as a promising explanation.

Referential processing relies on similar cognitive functions across languages – in particular, working memory. However, this has only been investigated in spoken languages with highly similar referential systems. In contrast to spoken languages, American Sign Language (ASL) uses a spatial referential system. It is unknown whether the referential system of ASL (L1) impacts referential processing in English (L2). This cross-language impact may be of particular importance for deaf, bimodal bilinguals who sign in ASL and read in English. Self-paced reading times of pronouns in English texts were compared between ASL–English bimodal bilinguals and Chinese–English unimodal bilinguals. The results showed that L1 referential characteristics influenced pronoun reading time in L2. Furthermore, in contrast to Chinese–English bilinguals, ASL–English bilinguals’ referential processing during reading of English texts relied on vocabulary knowledge – not working memory. These findings emphasize the need to expand current theories of referential processing to include more diverse types of language transfer.

The present study investigated the effects of processing instruction (PI) on the acquisition of accusative case markers in German, focusing on whether PI influences learners’ online processing behaviors. Third and fourth semester L1 English-L2 German learners were divided into two groups: a traditional instruction (TI) group and a PI group. Participants completed offline sentence interpretation and production tasks, as well as a self-paced reading (SPR) task, which provides a detailed investigation of how PI alters processing strategies. Results showed that the PI group outperformed the TI group on the sentence interpretation task and matched their performance on the production task. The SPR task revealed that, in some conditions, the PI group showed increased attention to and processing of accusative case markers after training, while the TI group did not. The results provide some support for the claim that PI is effective because it alters learners’ processing strategies.

The present study is, to our knowledge, the first self-paced reading experiment to investigate the effects of syntactic violation and semantic ambiguity on processing English modal auxiliaries. Forty undergraduate students, native speakers of English, took part in the study and read 36 target sentences, each containing a modal verb in context. Two of the most frequent English modals, can and may, were used in three distinct categories of modal expression: agent-oriented/ability, epistemic possibility, and speaker-oriented/permission. The two modal auxiliaries were manipulated such that they were either congruent or incongruent with the context, or in the case of permission felicitous or infelicitous relative to the context. We found that incongruent modal use in an agent-oriented context resulted in a reading penalty that was observed in a spillover on the segments following the modal and the lexical verb. Incongruent modal use to express epistemic possibility significantly affected reading times immediately after the modal auxiliary, and also spilt over to the following segments. Reading times in sentences expressing speaker-oriented modality were not affected by inconsistency in the use of the modal verb unmarked for formality in a formal context. The substantive and methodological implications of findings are discussed.

Y-adjectives are English adjectives that end in an orthographic <y> and a /i/ sound, for example lazy. Deriving its hypotheses from previous corpus findings and construction-based principles to language study, the experiment here reported validates the benefit a comparative alternation account of y-adjectives will accrue from a consideration of more and -er constructions across disyllabic adjectives that are not y-ones (called the HANDSOME adjectives). Reading times related to the comparative constructions of morphologically complex and simple y-adjectives were collected before and after native speaker exposure to one of three treatments – a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME more constructions, a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME-er constructions, or a control condition. Processing of y-adjective more constructions was found eased with exposure to HANDSOME more constructions. This exposure moreover overrode an anticipated processing ease for simple y-adjective -er constructions, while an exposure to HANDSOME -er constructions overrode an anticipated processing ease for complex y-adjective more constructions. The findings support the value of a constructional approach to understanding y-adjective comparatives.

Self-paced reading tests (SPRs) are being increasingly adopted by second language (L2) researchers. Using SPR with L2 populations presents specific challenges, and its use is still evolving in L2 research (as well as in first language research, in many respects). Although the topic of several narrative overviews (Keating & Jegerski, 2015; Roberts, 2016), we do not have a comprehensive picture of its usage in L2 research. Building on the growing body of systematic reviews of research practices in applied linguistics (e.g., Liu & Brown, 2015; Plonsky, 2013), we report a methodological synthesis of the rationales, study contexts, and methodological decision making in L2 SPR research. Our comprehensive search yielded 74 SPRs used in L2 research. Each instrument was coded along 121 parameters, including: reported rationales and study characteristics, indicating the scope and nature of L2 SPR research agendas; design and analysis features and reporting practices, determining instrument validity and reliability; and materials transparency, affecting reproducibility and systematicity of agendas. Our findings indicate an urgent need to standardize the use and reporting of this technique, requiring empirical investigation to inform methodological decision making. We also identify several areas (e.g., study design, sample demographics, instrument construction, data analysis, and transparency) where SPR research could be improved to enrich our understanding of L2 processing, reading, and learning.

The present study explores the early stages of incidental acquisition of grammatical gender during reading in German as a second language (L2) using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results show that advanced L2 learners are sensitive to gender agreement violations after as few as three to four exposures to a novel noun within a short text. The results also indicate that the acquisition of grammatical gender from syntactic context is gender dependent: Whereas gender violation effects were observed for feminine and neuter nouns, no such effects were observed for masculine nouns.

The study investigates the effects of grammatical gender on bilingual processing. Native speakers of Russian (a gendered language) learning English and monolingual English controls performed a self-paced reading task in English (a non-gendered language). As predicted, bilingual speakers showed delayed latencies to gendered pronouns (he or she) that were incongruent with the noun's grammatical gender in Russian, indicating that first language (L1) grammatical gender assignment can be interpreted as biological gender in nonnative (L2) processing. The L1 gender bias was only found in sentences containing animate, but not inanimate, nouns. These results speak against the syntactic mechanism being solely responsible for gender biases, but rather support a semantic transfer account due to coactivation of linguistic and conceptual features as proposed in the sex and gender hypothesis (SAGH, Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli & Dworzynski, 2005). Overall, the study provides clear evidence for the L1 grammatical gender bias in bilingual processing, albeit constrained by animacy.