Sensitivity to Morphosyntactic Violations in English as a Second Language

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which ESL learners from different language backgrounds are sensitive to subject-verb agreement and case errors in L2 sentence processing. Proficient German, Japanese and Chinese-speaking ESL learners participated in a speeded grammaticality judgement task and an untimed sentence completion task. Despite demonstrating excellent knowledge of both grammatical phenomena in the untimed task, the learners differed from the native speaker controls in the speeded grammaticality judgement task in that they showed less sensitivity to agreement than to case irrespective of their language background. Our findings indicate that learners' frequently noted problems with verbal inflectional morphology, which have also previously been hypothesised to reflect a production-specific ‘mapping’ deficit, are not indeed only limited to second language production but extend to comprehension. The results also suggest that the role of L1 influence in L2 morphosyntactic processing is more limited than might be expected.