Advanced learners’ sensitivity to misuses of connectives during on-ling processing: The role of L1 transfer

Degand, Liesbeth [UCL] Zufferey, Sandrine [Universiteit Utrecht]

In the proposed paper, we analyze the processing of two English discourse connectives (when and if) by advanced Dutch-speaking learners, French-speaking learners and native English-speakers. Our goal is to assess the role of L1 transfer for students’ detection of misuses during online processing and when performing grammaticality judgments. Two types of misuses are included: inappropriate semantic uses of when, conveying a conditional meaning (1) and typically produced by Dutch-speaking learners (as evidenced from the International Corpus of Learner English, Granger et al. 2009) and inappropriate semantic uses of if with a contrastive meaning (2), typically produced by French-speaking learners. (1) The kids don’t look very tired today. When they don’t take a nap now, we can go out for a walk. (2) The admission policy for foreign students is variable across universities. If in some of them all students can enroll, in others there is an entrance examination. Our material contains 32 pairs of sentences alternating between correct and incorrect uses of connectives (when/if for condition and if/while for contrast) and 32 filler sentences alternating between correct and incorrect uses of the relative pronouns who and whom for subject and object relatives. The same material is used for an eye-tracking experiment and a grammaticality judgment task. We observe a difference between the three groups in the grammaticality judgment task, reflecting a strong L1 transfer effect. However, the three groups have the same reaction to these misuses during online reading (reflected in longer regression path durations in the regions following the connectives), revealing an implicit sensitivity to misuses of connectives pertaining to their L1 system that was never uncovered in previous offline tasks.