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ERIC Number: EJ1093073
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Mar
Pages: 29
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0272-2631
EISSN: N/A
Number Attraction Effects in Near-Native Spanish Sentence Comprehension
Jegerski, Jill
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, v38 n1 p5-33 Mar 2016
Grammatical agreement phenomena such as verbal number have long been of fundamental interest in the study of second language (L2) acquisition. Previous research from the perspective of sentence processing has documented nativelike behavior among nonnative participants but has also relied almost exclusively on grammar violation paradigms. The present investigation examined the online comprehension of subject-verb number agreement by native and nonnative speakers of Mexican Spanish using the more subtle agreement attraction paradigm, with stimuli grammatical in both conditions, in addition to a nonlocal grammaticality paradigm. The results of a self-paced reading experiment confirmed that nonnatives can acquire nativelike online sensitivity to verbal number agreement, even without grammar errors, and that such sensitivity develops only at very high levels of L2 proficiency.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: BCS0844035