On Wednesday, 10/12 @noon in Tobin 521B, we’ll hear from Annika Andersson from Linnaeus University who will talk about “ERP Studies of Cross-Linguistic Influence on Second Language Processing of Syntax and Semantics.”  The abstract for Annika’s talk is below.

Studies comparing second language (L2) processing to first language (L1) processing as measured with event-related potentials have investigated syntactic, morphosyntactic, and semantic processing. Typically, these studies find L2-processing of syntax and morphosyntax to be related to mainly age of acquisition (AoA) but also to proficiency (see Steinhauer et al., 2009 for an overview). The earlier the language is acquired the more similar the processing, such that when the L2 is acquired prior to 3 years of age a native like biphasic ERP response (LAN/P600) can be found (Weber-Fox & Neville, 1996). With high L2 proficiency, even with later AoA some studies show L2 processing of syntax to be native like (Bowden et al., 2007). In contrast to syntactic processing, for semantic processing only proficiency seems to be a relevant predictor and only for quantitative differences in the ERP effect, in this case the N400 (Moreno & Kutas, 2005). In addition to AoA and proficiency, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) has been investigated on morphosyntactic processing (Dowens et al., 2010; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008). In these studies, shared structures (gender agreement) in L1 and L2 support more native like processing of the L2 construct.

In this talk, I will present two studies where we investigated the effects of CLI on L2-processing. First, we compared processing of Swedish word order, verb second, in two groups of learners matched on proficiency and AoA, but whose L1 have similar word order (German) or not (English) (Andersson et al. 2019). In this study of word order processing, we replicated the previous findings of CLI effects on morphosyntactic processing. Second, we compared processing of fine-grained L2 verb semantics (placement verbs) that were either shared or not shared with the L1 (German and English). In contrast to previous ERP studies of semantic processing we found qualitative differences between semantic processing in a first and second language. In addition, these differences could be explained by CLI (Andersson & Gullberg, 2022). These studies show the importance of including CLI as a predictor of L2 processing but also that previous studies not finding qualitative differences in L1 and L2 semantic processing could be due to restricting the investigation into shared
semantic concepts.