The transition towards efficient processing of L2

A longitudinal fMRI study of sentence comprehension (Indefrey, Hellwig, Davidson, Gullberg)

Using behavioural and fMRI experiments focusing on syntactic processing, we tested a group of Chinese learners of Dutch at regular intervals. Results showed hemodynamic responses to sentences as compared to word stimuli after six months of learning. No behavioural measure showed a corresponding time course.

Short-term learning of German adjective declension (Davidson, Indefrey)

This line of research investigates ERP correlates of learning adjective declension in German, which differs from previously studied morphosyntactic regularities in that the required suffixes depend on the syntactic context. During a pre-test, no electrophysiological differences were observed between declension violation and control conditions, and participants’ classification performance was near chance. During the training and post-test phases classification improved, and there was a P600-like violation response to declension but not gender violations. An error-related response during training was associated with improvement in grammatical discrimination from pre-test to post-test.

A meta-analysis of cerebral activation patterns in bilingual speakers and listeners (Indefrey)

This research analysed the findings of 26 hemodynamic experiments comparing within-subject L1 and L2 language processing in a range of tasks. The results suggest that reliably stronger activation during L2 processing is found (a) only for task-specific subgroups of L2 speakers and (b) within some, but not all regions that are also typically activated in native language processing.

Word order distributions in Turkish and Dutch written sentences (Schneider, Şahin, Indefrey)

As pilot research for an ongoing study of sentence processing in Turkish-Dutch bilinguals (Schneider, PhD), we investigated word order distributions in two corpora of Turkish (n=838) and Dutch (n=1000) newspaper sentences. Results showed relatively strict SOV order in Turkish and more variable word order in Dutch (SVO>SOV>VSO).

Learner vocabulary (Davidson, Indefrey, Gullberg, Hellwig, Brown, A.)

For methodological purposes, the group has constructed lists of vocabulary items likely to be known by learners of low proficiency. The items on these lists constitute an intersection of the most frequent words in corpora of spoken and written language, and word lists from teaching materials. The statistical properties of the words in these lists are then compared to usage in learner corpora.

L2 sentence comprehension in noise (Oliver, Indefrey, Gullberg)

This study investigated the development of automaticity in L2 online auditory comprehension. We used a word monitoring in noise task which combined different levels of semantic and syntactic predictability of a target word in a stimulus sentence with different levels of background noise. A group of ab initio German learners of Dutch was tested at regular intervals for a period of 4 months. Results showed the L2 speakers were performing at the same level as Dutch native controls by the end of the study and used the syntactic, but not the semantic cues present in the stimuli from the beginning onwards. The L2 speakers were not more affected by background noise than the Dutch native controls.