Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language

L1 Versus L2 Gender Agreement Processing: Reliance on Gender Assignment or Morphophonological Cue Matching?

Studies exploring gender agreement processing in late bilinguals whose first language (L1) lacks the gender feature suggest that advanced second language (L2) learners can detect gender agreement violations in the L2. Importantly, these studies have mainly included gender canonical nouns (e.g., la silla, el libro). However, the specific mechanisms L2 learners use while processing L2 gender agreement are unclear: Do learners rely on morphophonological cues (i.e., gender suffix) or on their gender assignment? In this study, English advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish monolinguals completed a moving window task containing sentences with canonical and deceptive nouns engaged in noun-adjective gender (dis)agreement relations (e.g., casa antigua/*o, mano rosada/*o). Results revealed that Spanish monolinguals and advanced L2 learners were sensitive to violations with canonical nouns. However, native speakers were significantly slower at computing gender disagreement than agreement with deceptive nouns, while advanced L2 learners exhibited the opposite processing pattern (i.e., they took longer to process gender agreement than disagreement with deceptive nouns). The findings suggest that native speakers seem to rely on their gender assignment, while L2 learners focus more on suffix matching patterns (i.e., if -o in the noun, -o in the adjective).

How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives - for example, rare or polyfunctional ones - might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives (Experiment 1), secondly less frequent ones (Experiment 2), and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete (Experiment 3). Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives.