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PREDICTIVE PROCESSING OF IMPLICIT CAUSALITY IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

A VISUAL-WORLD EYE-TRACKING STUDY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2020

Hyunwoo Kim Open the ORCID record for Hyunwoo Kim [Opens in a new window]  and
Theres Grüter Open the ORCID record for Theres Grüter [Opens in a new window]
Hyunwoo Kim*
Affiliation:
Yonsei University
Theres Grüter
Affiliation:
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hyunwoo Kim, Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Implicit causality (IC) is a well-known phenomenon whereby certain verbs appear to create biases to remention either their subject or object in a causal dependent clause. This study investigated to what extent Korean learners of English made use of IC information for predictive processing at a discourse level, and whether L2 proficiency played a modulating role in this process. Results from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment showed early use of IC information in both L1 and L2 listeners, yet the effect was weaker and emerged later in the L2 group. None of three independent and intercorrelated proficiency measures modulated L2 listeners’ processing behavior. The findings suggest that L2 listeners are able to engage in prediction during real-time processing at a discourse level, although they did so to a more limited extent than native speakers in this study. We discuss these findings in light of similar evidence from other recent work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 133 - 154
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was part of the first author’s PhD dissertation research, funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1749240). We thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of SSLA for their insightful feedback and suggestions. We are also grateful to Shinichiro Fukuda, Kamil Ud Deen, William O’Grady, and Bonnie D. Schwartz for their feedback, and Amber B. Camp and Fred Zenker for help with various aspects of this research. Supplementary materials are publicly available at https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/detail?id=york:938107

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