Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T00:03:45.089Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grammatical gender processing in L2: Electrophysiological evidence of the effect of L1–L2 syntactic similarity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2010

ALICE FOUCART  and
CHERYL FRENCK-MESTRE
ALICE FOUCART*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
CHERYL FRENCK-MESTRE
Affiliation:
CNRS, Université de Provence
*
Address for correspondence: Alice Foucart, University of Edinburgh, 21, Hill Place, Edinburgh EH8 9DP, Scotland[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines the effect of proficiency and similarity between the first and the second language on grammatical gender processing in L2. In three experiments, we manipulated gender agreement violations within the determiner phrase (DP), between the determiner and the noun (Experiment 1), the postposed adjective and the noun (Experiment 2) and the preposed adjective and the noun (Experiment 3). We compared the performance of German advanced learners of French to that of French native controls. The results showed a similar P600 effect for native and non-native speakers for agreement violations when agreement rules where similar in L1 and L2 (Experiment 1, depending on proficiency), whereas no effect was found for L2 learners when agreement rules varied across languages. These results suggest that syntactic processing in L2 is affected by the similarity of syntactic rules in L1 and L2.

Keywords

second language acquisitiongrammatical genderERPs
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 379 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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 study was supported by a grant from the French Ministry of Foreign affairs.

References

Ardal, S., Donald, M. W., Meuter, R., Muldrew, S., & Luce, M. (1990). Brain responses to semantic incongruity in bilinguals. Brain and Language, 39, 187–205.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barber, H., & Carreiras, M. (2005). Grammatical gender and number in Spanish: An ERP comparison. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 137–153.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bartning, I. (2000). Gender agreement in L2 French: Pre-advanced vs. advanced learners. Studia Linguistica, 54, 225–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, J. (1991). DPs in French and Walloon: Evidence for parametric variation in nominal head movement. Probus, 3, 101–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, E., Polisenska, D., & Unsworth, S. (2008). The acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research, 24: 259–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolte, J., & Conine, C. (2004). Grammatical gender in spoken word recognition in German. Perception & Psychophysics, 66 (6), 1018–1032.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bruhn de Garavito, J., & White, L. (2002). L2 acquisition of Spanish DPs: The status of grammatical features. In Pérez-Leroux, A. T. & Liceras, J. M. (eds.), The acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax: The L1/L2 Connection, pp. 151–176. Doradrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Carroll, S. (1989). Second language acquisition and the computational paradigm. Language Learning, 39, 535–594.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Eve (1985). The acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition 1, pp. 687–782. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deutsch, A., & Bentin, S. (2001). Syntactic and semantic factors in processing gender agreement in Hebrew: Evidence from ERPs and eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 200–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, J. M., & Véronique, D. (2001). Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: A cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 275–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucart, A., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2006). Processing of adjectives in French as first and second language: Evidence from ERPs. Presented at CUNY, New York, USA, 23–25 March.Google Scholar
Foucart, A., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2007). Is adjective processing in L2 affected by L1? Evidence from ERPs and eye-tracking. Presented at Architecture and Mechanisms of Language Processing, Turku, Finland, 24–27 August.Google Scholar
Frenck-Mestre, C. (2005). Eye-movement as a tool for studying syntactic processing in a second language: A review of methodologies and experimental findings. Second Language Research, 21, 175–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friederici, A. D. (2002). Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 78–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friederici, A. D., Hahne, A., & Saddy, D. (2002). Distinct neurophysiological patterns reflecting aspects of syntactic complexity and syntactic repair. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31 (1), 45–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gillon Dowens, M., Vergara, M., Barber, H., & Carreiras, M. (2010). Morpho-syntactic processing in late L2 learners. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22 (8), 1870–1887.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grandfelt, J. (2000). The acquisition of the determiner phrase in bilingual and second language French. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3 (3), 263–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenhouse, S. W., & Geisser, S. (1959). On methods in the analysis of profile data. Psychometrika, 24, 95–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunter, T. C., Friederici, A. D., & Schriefers, H. (2000). Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late interaction. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 556–568.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (1999). Gender electrified: ERP evidence on the syntactic nature of gender processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 715–728.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hahne, A. (2001). What's different in second language processing? Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 251–266.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hahne, A., & Friederici, A. D. (2001). Processing a second language: Late learners’ comprehension mechanisms as revealed by event-related brain potentials. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 123–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hahne, A., Mueller, J., & Clahsen, H. (2006). Morphological processing in a second language: Behavioural and event-related potential evidence for storage and decomposition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 121–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hasting, A., & Kotz, S. (2008). Speeding up syntax: On the relative timing and automaticity of local phrase structure and morphosyntactic processing as reflected in event-related brain potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20 (7), 1207–1219.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hasting, A., Kotz, S., & Friederici, A. (2007). Setting the stage for automatic syntax processing: The mismatch negativity as an indicator of syntactic priming. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (3), 386–400.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hawkins, R., & Chan, C. (1997). The partial availability of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition: The “failed functional features hypothesis”. Second Language Research, 13, 187–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herschensohn, J. (2006). Français langue seconde: From functional categories to functionalist variation. Second Language Research, 22, 95–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herschensohn, J. (2007). Language development and age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2007). Ultimate attainment at the interfaces in second language acquisition: G~rammar and processing. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Groningen.Google Scholar
Inoue, K., & Osterhout, L. (2005). Honorifics in Japanese: An ERP study. Presented at the Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Tucson, March.Google Scholar
Jasper, H. H. (1958). The ten twenty electrode system of the International Federation. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 5, 196–214.Google Scholar
Laenzlinger, C. (2005). French adjective ordering: Perspectives on DP-internal movement types. Lingua, 115, 645–689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malaia, E., Wilbur, R. B., & Weber-Fox, C. (2009). ERP evidence for telicity effects on syntactic processing in garden-path sentences. Brain and language, 108, 145–158.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mirković, J., MacDonald, M. C., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2005). Where does gender come from? Evidence from a complex inflectional system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 139–168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Müller, N. (1990). Gender and number agreement within DP. In Meisel, J. M. (ed.), Bilingual first language acquisition: French and German grammar development, pp. 53–88. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Müller, O. & Hagoort, P. (2006). Access to lexical information in language comprehension: Semantics before syntax. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 84–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
New, B., Pallier, C., Brysbaert, M., & Ferrand, L. (2004) Lexique 2: A new French lexical database. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36 (3), 516–524.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Osterhout, L., Bersick, M., & McKinnon, R. (1997). Brain potentials elicited by words: Word length and frequency predict the latency of an early negativity. Biological Psychology, 46, 143–168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Kim, A., & Inoue, K. (2004). Sentences in the brain: Event-related potentials as real-time reflections of sentence comprehension and language learning. In Carreiras, M. & Clifton, C. Jr. (eds.), The on-line study of sentence comprehension: Eyetracking, ERP, and beyond, pp. 271–308. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Pitkänen, I., Frenck-Mestre, C., & Molinaro, N. (2006). Novice learners, longitudinal designs, and event-related potentials: A paradigm for exploring the neurocognition of second-language processing. Language Learning, 56, 199–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osterhout, L. & Mobley, L. A. (1995). Event-related brain potentials elicited by failure to agree. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 739–773.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parodi, T., Schwartz, B. D., & Clahsen, H. (1997). On the L2 acquisition of morphosyntax of German nominals. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, 15, 1–43.Google Scholar
Perez-Pereira, M. (1991). The acquisition of gender: What Spanish children tell us. Journal of Child Language, 18, 571–590.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pulvermüller, F., & Shtyrov, Y. (2003). Automatic processing of grammar in the human brain as revealed by the mismatch negativity. NeuroImage, 20, 159–172.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pulvermüller, F., Shtyrov, Y., Hasting, A. S., & Carlyon, R. P. (2008). Syntax as a reflex: Neurophysiological evidence for early automaticity of grammatical processing. Brain and Language, 104, 244–253.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rossi, S., Gugler, M. F., Friederici, A. D., & Hahne, A. (2006). The impact of proficiency on syntactic second-language processing of German and Italian: Evidence from event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 2030–2048.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sabourin, L. (2003). Grammatical gender and second language processing: an ERP study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen.Google Scholar
Sabourin, L., & Haverkort, M. (2003). Neural substrates of representation and processing of a second language. In van, R. Hout, Hulk, A., Kuiken, F. and Towell, R. J. (eds.), The lexicon–syntax interface in second language acquisition, pp. 175–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sabourin, L., & Stowe, L. A. (2008) Second language processing: When are L1 and L2 processed similarly? Second Language Research. 24 (3), 397–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spinelli, E., Meunier, F., & Seigneuric, A. (2006). Does gender information influence early phases of spoken word recognition? The Mental Lexicon, 1, 277–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tokowicz, N., & MacWhinney, B. (2005). Implicit and explicit measures of sensitivity to violations in second language grammar: An event related potential investigation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2, 173–204.Google Scholar
Weber-Fox, C. M., & Neville, H. J. (1996). Maturational constraints on functional specializations for language processing: ERP and behavioural evidence in bilingual speakers. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8, 231–256.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
White, L., Valenzuela, E., Kozlowska-Macregor, M., & Leung, Y. I. (2004). Gender and number agreement in non-native Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 105–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar