Learning new languages is a complex task involving both explicit and implicit processes (i.e., that do/do not involve awareness). Understanding how these processes interact is essential to a full account of second language (L2) learning, but accounts vary as to whether explicit processes help (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007), hinder (e.g., Ellis &…

Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. "eat," "sleep") can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language's rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this…

In 2 ERP experiments participants read 4-word sequences presented for 200 ms (RPVP paradigm) and were required to decide whether the word sequences were grammatical or not. In Experiment 1, the word sequence consisted of either a grammatically correct sentence (e.g., "she can sing now") or an ungrammatical scrambled sequence (e.g.,…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the presence of predictions in language comprehension comes from event-related potential (ERP) studies which show that encountering an adjective whose gender marking is inconsistent with that of a highly expectable noun leads to an effect at the adjective. Until now the mechanism underlying this…

Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

The present study examined the locus responsible for the effect of emotional state on sentence processing in healthy native speakers of Japanese, using event-related brain potentials. The participants were induced into a happy, neutral, or sad mood and then subjected to electroencephalogram recording during which emotionally neutral sentences,…

The present study examines both properties of the language and properties of the learner to better understand variability at the earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition. We used event-related potentials, an oral production task, and a battery of individual differences measures to examine the processing of number and gender agreement in…

In 3 ERP experiments, we investigated how experienced L2 speakers process natural and correct syntactic input that deviates from their own, sometimes incorrect, syntactic representations. Our previous study (Lemhöfer, Schriefers, & Indefrey, 2014) had shown that L2 speakers do engage in native-like syntactic processing of gender agreement but…

The usage-based theory highlights the important role of linguistic input in language acquisition, and assumes that syntactic representations could be entrenched through usage or exposure. In the present study, we used the event-related potential technique to investigate the long-term effect of input training on second language (L2) syntactic…

Purpose: This study examined the use of African American English (AAE) among a group of young Latinx bilingual children and the accuracy of the English Morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) in classifying these children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Children (N = 81) between the…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

The topic of this dissertation concerns the ways that (IN)ANIMACY distinctions interact with various sub-systems of the human language faculty, in particular, morpho-syntax. In Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), morpho-syntax and ANIMACY can be pit against each other directly on the same set of target words, allowing a close inspection of the…

Recent research has shown that distinct event-related potential (ERP) signatures are associated with switching between languages compared to switching between dialects or registers (e.g., Khamis-Dakwar & Froud, 2007; Moreno, Federmeier & Kutas, 2002). The current investigation builds on these findings to examine whether contrastive and…