2018 Sat Poster 6388

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Building anticipation in real-time processing: The use of grammatical gender in L2 French
K. Miller, K. Moors

Predictive processing, in which various linguistic (e.g., syntactic, morphological, prosodic) and nonlinguistic cues (e.g., real-world knowledge, lexical frequency) can be used to anticipate upcoming linguistic input, is argued to be fundamental to the human language processing system (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2007, 2013), contributing to the efficiency with which real-time processing takes place (e.g., Kuperberg, 2013).

Research has shown that native speakers (NSs) can use grammatical gender information encoded in definite articles to anticipate upcoming nouns. Thus, in eye-tracking research, when presented with two or more objects from different grammatical gender classes, NSs will shift their gaze to the relevant object upon hearing the article, which provides enough information to distinguish between the objects (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007). In contrast, second language (L2) learners have been somewhat less successful (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010; cf. Dussias et al., 2013; Hopp & Lemmerth, 2016), lending support to the RAGE hypothesis, which maintains that L2 learners exhibit a Reduced Ability to Generate Expectations (Grüter et al., 2014).

However, L2 processing has been shown to lag behind native language processing. Such a delay could nullify any anticipatory benefits if predictions cannot keep pace with the input (Foucart et al., 2014). Thus, it might be that the capacity to anticipate is affected during L2 processing more so than that this ability is reduced in L2 learners. Another potential factor affecting previous results might be the salience of the cues. Providing multiple cues to grammatical gender may boost predictive processing among L2 learners (Fowler & Jackson, 2017).

Thus, the current study reports on an eye-tracking experiment that uses clitic doubling in French to provide an additional, earlier cue to grammatical gender. Object pronouns le and la ‘it’ are preverbal clitics that reflect the grammatical gender of the nouns they represent. In the visual world paradigm, participants see two images on a computer screen. They hear a sentence as in (1a-c) and they are asked to look at the named object. Reaction times are compared across trials with two objects of different grammatical genders (the gender information provided by the grammatical cues is informative) and trials with objects of the same grammatical gender (the gender information is uninformative). The sentence in (1a) provides two cues to grammatical gender: the object pronoun and the definite article. In (1b), there is only the earlier cue to gender on the object pronoun, due to elision of the definite article when followed by a vowel-initial adjective; finally, in (1c), there is only the later gender cue on the definite article. (Note that feminine (e) does not affect the pronunciation of joli.)

Pilot results targeting only the double-cue condition (1a) among intermediate classroom learners of French (n = 15) showed significantly faster response times in different-gender trials, for both masculine and feminine nouns (Figure 1). The other conditions will be tested in an expanded experiment with data collection taking place over the summer with NSs as well as L2 learners in an immersion context.

References

Dussias, P. E., Valdés Kroff, J. R., Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand: Grammatical gender processing in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 353- 387.

Foucart, A., Martin, C. D., Moreno, E. M., & Costa, A. (2014). Can bilinguals see it coming? Word anticipation in L2 sentence reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 40, 1461-1469.

Fowler, C. J., & Jackson, C. N. (2017). Facilitating morphosyntactic and semantic prediction among second language speakers of German. Journal of Cognitive Psychology. doi: 10.1080/20445911.2017.1353517

Grüter, T., Rohde, H., & Schafer, A. J. (2014). The role of discourse-level expectations in non-native speakers’ referential choices. In Proceedings of the 38th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 179-191).

Hopp, H., & Lemmerth, N. (2016). Lexical and syntactic congruency in L2 predictive gender processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. doi:10.1017/S0272263116000437

Kuperberg, Gina R. (2013). The proactive comprehender: What event-related potentials tell us about the dynamics of reading comprehension. In B. Miller, L. Cutting, & P. McCardle (Eds.), Unraveling the behavioral, neurobiological, and genetic components of reading comprehension (pp. 176-192). Baltimore: Paul Brookes Publishing.

Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 18, 193-198.

Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2010). Real-time processing of gender-marked article by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 447-464.

Pickering, Martin J., & Garrod, Simon. (2013). An integrated theory of language production and comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 329-347.