Project Details
Projekt
AGREE: Agreement in native and second language processing (second phase proposal)
Subject Area
Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
Term
since 2016
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317308350
A key question in second language (L2) research concerns the factors that shape learners’ ability to parse sentences in real-time. Intuitively, one might think that native (L1) grammatical constraints always play a central role. However, an important test case—the processing of agreement with possessive forms like “his” and “her”—reveals that L2 processing is sometimes driven more strongly by factors other than L1 influence. This project seeks to identify these other factors and to address whether L1 influence can differentially affect L2 production and comprehension.Possessives are especially useful to study L1 influence because they convey different types of agreement relationships across languages. Possessives are also difficult to acquire in an L2: For example, learners of L2 English often produce gender errors with possessives. Previous studies attributed these errors to L1 influence, more specifically to the misapplication of L1 agreement constraints. The first phase of this project demonstrated that possessive difficulties extend to the comprehension of L2 German. But in contrast to previous research, we found that L1 influence could not solely explain these patterns because difficulties impacted L2 learners with different L1 agreement constraints, and also German native speakers. These results raise some important questions: First, what cognitive mechanism underlies possessive processing in comprehension—if not L1 influence—and why does it affect both L1 and L2 speakers? Second, why did our results differ from those of previous research? Was it due to differences between languages: English vs. German? Or was it due to differences between modalities: comprehension vs. production? These questions are tackled in the current project using a combination of eye-tracking techniques—as in the project’s first phase—and novel production paradigms.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
