ELiTU&BIMU, Utrecht University, UIL OTS
Lexical bottlenecks in the processing of L2 morphosyntax
Holger Hopp, Mannheim University
In this talk, I explore the extent to which aspects of lexical representations and processing
affect grammatical processing in late L2 learners. I will present data from a series of eye
tracking experiments in the visual-world paradigm on grammatical gender agreement and in
the reading paradigm on syntactic ambiguity resolution.
Experiments 1 and 2 show how the nature of lexical (gender) representations affects the online predictive processing of grammatical gender agreement in English-German learners. In
the third experiment, I demonstrate how non-native German readers of English with lower
degrees of lexical automaticity fail to compute syntactic structure in L2 reading; yet, once
speed of lexical access is controlled for, robust and native-like structure-driven parsing
preferences surface in adult L2ers, too.