Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2016
Over the years, models proposed for second-language (L2) processing have been remarkably parallel to those proposed for Broca's aphasia. Differences between agrammatic and unaffected language processing have been explained, e.g., in terms of lack of detailed syntactic structure building (Grodzinsky, 1995), resource deficits (Haarman, Just & Carpenter, 1997), slow syntactic processing (Burkhardt, Avrutin, Piñango & Ruigendijk, 2008), or slowed lexical access (Love, Swinney, Walenski & Zurif, 2008). Each of these approaches have their homolog in L2 processing (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006; McDonald, 2006; Dekydtspotter, Schwartz & Sprouse, 2006; Hopp, 2013, respectively). It is therefore not surprising that Cunnings's proposal (Cunnings, 2016) parallels another idea in aphasia and aging research, namely that deviations from healthy young adult monolingual sentence processing can be attributed to an increased susceptibility to interference (e.g., Sheppard, Walenski, Love & Shapiro, 2015).