SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR. Lydia White. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 316. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper. Actually, I could justifiably end my review here. Lydia White has come out with a new textbook on Universal Grammar (UG) and SLA; buy it. End of story. Still, I have 724 words left, so for those readers whose SLA research has been conducted on a different planet, let me pad things out a bit.

Second language acquisition and universal grammar

This study investigates the effects of linear distance and working memory on native and advanced L2 Spanish speakers’ on-line sensitivity to violations of grammatical gender. Using eye-tracking, participants were tested on agreement violations on predicative adjectives located one, four, and seven words away from a controller noun. The results revealed that linear distance influenced both groups’ sensitivity to gender anomalies, albeit at different points on the linear distance continuum. Furthermore, each group’s sensitivity to gender violations emerged at different points in the eye-movement record. The reading span analysis revealed that the advanced learners’ sensitivity to gender errors during first-pass reading was moderated by individual differences in working memory. The results are discussed in light of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen a Felser, 2006b).

[The effects of linear distance and working memory on the processing of gender agreement in Spanish, Part III. Gender and number]

The L2 acquisition of English articles and tense-aspect (TA) have been popular research areas over the last two decades. Compared with the numerous applications of metalinguistic knowledge and oral production tasks, the use of online (real time) processing methods to investigate these morphosyntactic structures has been far less common. In perhaps the only eye-tracking study on L2 English article processing, Trenkic et al. (2014) showed that L1 Mandarin/L2 English learners are able to use articles in real time to resolve referent ambiguity in a similar manner to L1 English speakers. In one of the rare self-paced reading (SPR) studies on L2 English TA processing, Roberts and Liszka (2013) found that while L1 English and L1 French/L2 English speakers were sensitive to English present perfect violations, L1 German/L2 English speakers, whose first language grammaticalises tense but not aspect, were not. However, beyond these important findings, our understanding of the L2 online processing of these morphosyntactic structures remains limited. 
To address these gaps, the present thesis tested 24 L1 Mandarin/L2 English, 22 L1 Croatian/L2 English and 24 L1 English participants on an SPR task and in oral production. The SPR task used novel article stimuli and TA items adapted from Roberts and Liszka (2013) to test (implicit) sensitivity to violations, while a grammaticality judgement task (GJT) on the same stimuli was used to ascertain participants’ explicit knowledge. The comprehension data were triangulated with oral productions of English articles and tense elicited via an animated film retelling task. 
A linear mixed-effects model analysis revealed that the participants’ performance on both the SPR and oral production tasks was highly influenced by their L1. The findings lend support to the morphological congruency hypothesis (Jiang, Novokshanova, Masuda, & Wang, 2011) which posits that late L2 learners cannot fully acquire morphosyntactic features that are incongruent (realised differently or absent in the L1 and L2), which suggest several implications for further research.

Processing and production of unique and non-unique-to-L2 syntactic structures : the case of English articles and tense-aspect

The present study investigates how native speakers of British English (n=12) and advanced Russian learners of English (n=24) handle two types of tense-aspect mismatches: present perfect mismatches, where the present perfect form does not match the preceding adverbial (e.g. *Last year, Kate has studied French…), and past simple mismatches, where the past simple form does not match the preceding adverbial (e.g. *Since last year, Kate studied French…). The study also investigates whether the telicity of the verbs has any effects on the participants’ processing behavior. Native English speakers and Russian learners of L2 English all judged the mismatch items as less acceptable than the match items in an off-line judgment task in the present perfect. In the past simple condition, only advanced learners showed a sensitivity. In an on-line self-paced reading task, the native speakers showed a similar sensitivity to present perfect mismatches, but not to past simple mismatches. In contrast, the learners showed no sensitivity to mismatches in any condition on-line. Importantly, however, they showed an effect of telicity. The results for native speakers support corpus findings suggesting that there is a tendency for the present perfect to move away from its resultative sense (Yao, 2014). The results for learners suggest that, contrary to Roberts & Liszka (2013), the presence of grammaticalized aspect in the L1 does not lead to a native-like sensitivity to tense-aspect violations, but may affect their interpretation of English present perfect and past simple on-line and off-line. (Less)

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Processing of tense and aspect manipulations on-line in the first and second language: a self-paced reading study with Russian advanced learners of English.

Elena Eriksson

Papers

Processing of tense and aspect manipulations on-line in the first and second language: a self-paced reading study with Russian advanced learners of English.