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PROCESSING OF GENDER AND NUMBER AGREEMENT IN RUSSIAN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

The Devil Is in the Details

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2016

Natalia Romanova  and
Kira Gor
Natalia Romanova*
Affiliation:
The George Washington University
Kira Gor
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Natalia Romanova, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, The George Washington University, 2114 G St. NW. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The study investigated the processing of Russian gender and number agreement by native (n = 36) and nonnative (n = 36) participants using a visual lexical decision task with priming. The design included a baseline condition that helped dissociate the underlying components of priming (facilitation and inhibition). The results showed no differences in the magnitude of priming between native and nonnative participants, and between gender and number agreement. However, whereas the priming effect in native participants consisted of both facilitation and inhibition, in second language (L2) learners it was characterized by facilitation in the absence of inhibition. Furthermore, the nonnative processing failed to demonstrate the default form bias, which optimized gender and number processing in native participants. Taken together, the findings indicate that although highly proficient L2 learners are able to demonstrate nativelike priming effects, their processing of morphosyntactic information engages different processing mechanisms.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 97 - 128
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

The data reported in this study are from the PhD dissertation of the first author, completed at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2013. Parts of this work were presented at the Second Language Research Forum, in Provo, Utah (2013); the Ninth Morphological Processing Conference, in Potsdam, Germany (2015); and the Third St. Petersburg Winter Workshop on Experimental Studies of Speech and Language, in St. Petersburg, Russia (2015).
We are most grateful to study participants and to two anonymous SSLA reviewers, who provided very helpful comments and suggestions for improving the article.

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