The purpose of the present research is to examine how quickly and accurately Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners can make appropriateness judgments for second language (L2) requests. Previous studies in interlanguage pragmatics are limited in that they did not distinguish between types of pragmatic inappropriateness and also in that they used only offline measurement through questionnaires. The present study therefore distinguishes two types of pragmatic inappropriateness in L2 utterances (under-polite and over-polite) and measures the reaction time of learners' appropriateness judgments. The participants were 45 Japanese university students; they were asked to judge whether the presented L2 requests were appropriate or not in the situation, as quickly and accurately as possible. Six appropriate requests, five under-polite requests, and five over-polite requests were judged. Further, the degree of inappropriateness in under- and over-polite requests was manipulated from slightly inappropriate to very inappropriate. As a result, it was found that speed and accuracy of appropriateness judgments depend on the degree of (in)appropriateness of requests. In particular, extremely over-polite utterances were difficult for L2 learners to process.
