Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T20:25:24.090Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

PREDICTIVE PROCESSING OF IMPLICIT CAUSALITY IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

A VISUAL-WORLD EYE-TRACKING STUDY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2020

Hyunwoo Kim Open the ORCID record for Hyunwoo Kim [Opens in a new window]  and
Theres Grüter Open the ORCID record for Theres Grüter [Opens in a new window]
Hyunwoo Kim*
Affiliation:
Yonsei University
Theres Grüter
Affiliation:
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hyunwoo Kim, Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Implicit causality (IC) is a well-known phenomenon whereby certain verbs appear to create biases to remention either their subject or object in a causal dependent clause. This study investigated to what extent Korean learners of English made use of IC information for predictive processing at a discourse level, and whether L2 proficiency played a modulating role in this process. Results from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment showed early use of IC information in both L1 and L2 listeners, yet the effect was weaker and emerged later in the L2 group. None of three independent and intercorrelated proficiency measures modulated L2 listeners’ processing behavior. The findings suggest that L2 listeners are able to engage in prediction during real-time processing at a discourse level, although they did so to a more limited extent than native speakers in this study. We discuss these findings in light of similar evidence from other recent work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 133 - 154
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This research was part of the first author’s PhD dissertation research, funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1749240). We thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of SSLA for their insightful feedback and suggestions. We are also grateful to Shinichiro Fukuda, Kamil Ud Deen, William O’Grady, and Bonnie D. Schwartz for their feedback, and Amber B. Camp and Fred Zenker for help with various aspects of this research. Supplementary materials are publicly available at https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/detail?id=york:938107

References

Arnold, J. E., Eisenband, J. G., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2000). The rapid use of gender information: Evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eyetracking. Cognition, 76, B13–B26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Au, T. (1986). A verb is worth a thousand words: The causes and consequences of interpersonal events implicit in language. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 104–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bott, O., & Solstad, T. (2014). From verb to discourse: a novel account of implicit causality. In Hemforth, B., Schmiedtová, B., & Fabricius-Hansen, C. (Eds.), Psycholinguistic approaches to meaning and understanding across languages (pp. 213–251). International Publishing.Google Scholar
Brown, J. D. (1980). Relative merits of four methods for scoring cloze tests. The Modern Language Journal, 64, 311–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, J. D., & Grüter, T. (in press). The same cloze for all occasions? Using the Brown 1980 cloze test for measuring proficiency in SLA research. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching.Google Scholar
Brown, R., & Fish, D. (1983). The psychological causality implicit in language. Cognition, 14, 237–273.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chambers, C. G., & Cooke, H. (2009). Lexical competition during second-language listening: Sentence context, but not proficiency, constrains interference from the native lexicon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 1029–1040.Google Scholar
Cheng, W., & Almor, A. (2017). The effect of implicit causality and consequentiality on nonnative pronoun resolution. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38, 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheng, W., & Almor, A. (2019). A Bayesian approach to establishing coreference in second language discourse: Evidence from implicit causality and consequentiality verbs. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22, 456–475.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Contemori, C., & Dussias, E. P. (2018). Prediction at the discourse level in L2 English speakers: An eye-tracking study. In Bertolini, A. B., & Kaplan, M. J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Boston University Conference on language development (pp. 159–171). Cascadilla.Google Scholar
Contemori, C., & Dussias, P. E. (2019). Prediction at the discourse level in Spanish–English bilinguals: An eye-tracking study. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cozijn, R., Commandeur, E., Vonk, W., & Noordman, L. G. (2011). The time course of the use of implicit causality information in the processing of pronouns: A visual world paradigm study. Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 381–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLong, K. A., Troyer, M., & Kutas, M. (2014). Pre-processing in sentence comprehension: Sensitivity to likely upcoming meaning and structure. Language and Linguistics Compass, 8, 631–645.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dijkgraaf, A., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Duyck, W. (2017). Predicting upcoming information in native-language and non-native-language auditory word recognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 917–930.Google Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Featherstone, C. R., & Sturt, P. (2010). Because there was a cause for concern: An investigation into a word-specific prediction account of the implicit-causality effect. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 3–15.Google ScholarPubMed
Ferstl, E. C., Garnham, A., & Manouilidou, C. (2011). Implicit causality bias in English: A corpus of 300 verbs. Behavior Research Methods, 43, 124–135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foucart, A., Romero-Rivas, C., Gort, B. L., & Costa, A. (2016). Discourse comprehension in L2: Making sense of what is not explicitly said. Brain and Language, 163, 32–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garnham, A., Traxler, M., Oakhill, J., & Gernsabacher, M. A. (1996). The locus of implicit causality effects in comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 517–543.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garvey, C., & Caramazza, A. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs. Linguistic Inquiry, 5, 459–464.Google Scholar
Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. Psychological Review, 101, 371–395.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greene, S. B., & McKoon, G. (1995). Telling something we can’t know: Experimental approaches to verbs exhibiting implicit causality. Psychological Science, 6, 262–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28, 191–215.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grüter, T., Rohde, H., & Schafer, A. J. (2017). Coreference and discourse coherence in L2: The roles of grammatical aspect and referential form. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7, 199–229.Google Scholar
Grüter, T., Takeda, A., Rohde, H., & Schafer, A. J. (2018). Intersentential coreference expectations reflect mental models of events. Cognition, 177, 172–176.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartshorne, J. K. (2014). What is implicit causality? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 804–824.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartshorne, J. K., & Snedeker, J. (2013). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28, 1474–1508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartshorne, J. K., Sudo, Y., & Uruwashi, M. (2013). Are implicit causality pronoun resolution biases consistent across languages and cultures? Experimental Psychology, 60, 179–196.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hopp, H. (2010). Ultimate attainment in L2 inflection: Performance similarities between nonnative and native speakers. Lingua, 120, 901–931.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2013). Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability. Second Language Research, 29, 33–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2014). Working memory effects in the L2 processing of ambiguous relative clauses. Language Acquisition, 21, 250–278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2015). Semantics and morphosyntax in L2 predictive sentence processing. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 53, 277–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2018). The bilingual mental lexicon in L2 sentence processing. Second Language, 17, 5–27.Google Scholar
Hopp, H., & Lemmerth, N. (2018). Lexical and syntactic congruency in L2 predictive gender processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40, 171–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hulstijn, J. H. (2011). Language proficiency in native and non-native speakers: An agenda for research and suggestions for second-language assessment. Language Assessment Quarterly, 8, 229–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ito, A., Corley, M., & Pickering, M. J. (2018). A cognitive load delays predictive eye movements similarly during L1 and L2 comprehension. Bilingualism, Language and Cognition, 21, 251–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Itzhak, I., & Baum, S. R. (2015). Misleading bias-driven expectations in referential processing and the facilitative role of contrastive accent. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 623–650.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards Logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 434–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Järvikivi, J., Van Gompel, R. P., & Hyönä, J. (2017). The interplay of implicit causality, structural heuristics, and anaphor type in ambiguous pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 46, 525–550.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaan, E. (2014). Predictive sentence processing in L2 and L1: What is different? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4, 257–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaan, E., Dallas, A., & Wijnen, F. (2010). Syntactic predictions in second-language sentence processing. In Zwart, C. J.-W. & Vries, M. D. (Eds.), Structure preserved (pp. 207–214). John Benjamins Publishing Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaan, E., Futch, C., Fuertes, R. F., Mujcinovic, S., & de la Fuente, E. Á. (2019). Adaptation to syntactic structures in native and nonnative sentence comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics, 40, 3–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaan, E., Kirkham, J., & Wijnen, F. (2016). Prediction and integration in native and second-language processing of elliptical structures. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaiser, E., Runner, J. T., Sussman, R. S., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2009). Structural and semantic constraints on the resolution of pronouns and reflexives. Cognition, 112, 55–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kim, H., & Grüter, T. (2018). Crosslinguistic activation of referential bias: Effects replicate and are unaffected by L2 proficiency. In Poster presented at 8th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALANA). Indiana: University.Google Scholar
Kim, H., & Grüter, T. (2019). Cross-linguistic activation of implicit causality biases in Korean learners of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22, 441–455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N., & Palmer, M. (2008). A large-scale classification of English verbs. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal, 42, 21–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koornneef, A., Dotlačil, J., van den Broek, P., & Sanders, T. (2016). The influence of linguistic and cognitive factors on the time course of verb-based implicit causality. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 455–481.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koornneef, A., & Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2006). On the use of verb-based implicit causality in sentence comprehension: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 445–465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuperberg, G. R., & Jaeger, T. F. (2016). What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31, 32–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lemhöfer, K., & Broersma, M. (2012). Introducing LexTALE: A quick and valid lexical test for advanced learners of English. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 325–343.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2010). Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 447–464.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liu, R. & Nicol, J. (2010). Online processing of anaphora by advanced English learners. In Prior, M. T., Watanabe, Y., & Lee, S.-K. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2008 second language research forum (pp. 150–165). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Long, D. L., & De Ley, L. (2000). Implicit causality and discourse focus: The interaction of text and reader characteristics in pronoun resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 545–570.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H. K., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2007). The language experience and proficiency questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 940–967.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martin, C. D., Thierry, G., Kuipers, J. R., Boutonnet, B., Foucart, A., & Costa, A. (2013). Bilinguals reading in their second language do not predict upcoming words as native readers do. Journal of Memory and Language, 69, 574–588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matin, E., Shao, K. C., & Boff, K. R. (1993). Saccadic overhead: Information-processing time with and without saccades. Perception & Psychophysics, 53, 372–380.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mitsugi, S. (2018). Generating predictions based on semantic categories in a second language: A case of numeral classifiers in Japanese. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (published online 2018-07-03). https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2017-0118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omaki, A., Lau, E. F., Davidson White, I., Dakan, M. L., Apple, A., & Phillips, C. (2015). Hyper-active gap filling. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peters, R., Grüter, T., & Borovsky, A. (2018). Vocabulary size and native speaker self-identification influence flexibility in linguistic prediction among adult bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39, 1439–1469.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pyykkönen, P., & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Activation and persistence or implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. Experimental Psychology, 57, 5–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Quick Placement Test. (2001). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, L., Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (2008). Online pronoun resolution in L2 discourse: L1 influence and general learner effects. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30, 333–357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoonen, R. (2011). How language ability is assessed. In Hinkel, E. (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (Vol. II, pp. 701–716). Routledge.Google Scholar
Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22, 339–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, A. J., Pickering, M. J., & Sanford, A. J. (2000). The time course of the influence of implicit causality information: Focusing versus integration accounts. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 423–443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Bergen, G., & Flecken, M. (2017). Putting things in new places: Linguistic experience modulate the predictive power of placement verb semantics. Journal of Memory and Language, 92, 26–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Berkum, J. J. A., Koornneef, A., Otten, M., & Nieuwland, M. S. (2007). Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective. Brain Research, 1146, 158–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar