Description
One major difficulty in the field of Second Language Acquisition is attempting to accurately monitor how, and if, second language learners process various types of grammatical information during on-line (i.e., real-time) sentence comprehension. The present study addresses two questions: (1) Do advanced L2 learners have native-like knowledge of Spanish subject-verb agreement, and (2) Does linear distance between the noun and the verb affect advanced L2 learners' processing of subject verb agreement? Utilizing eyetracking equipment, this experiment recorded the eye movements of native Spanish speakers and advanced English-speaking learners of Spanish as they read sentences in Spanish that contained grammatical and ungrammatical instances of subject-verb agreement. Ungrammatical items involved person and/or number errors on the verb. In addition, the linear distance between the subject and the verb varied between zero, three, and six words. By comparing the reading times of native and nonnative speakers, this study finds that nonnative speakers of Spanish display native-like knowledge of Spanish verb morphology and native-like processing of morphosyntactic subject-verb agreement features in Spanish along increasing linear distances. The results are discussed in light of current theories of grammatical processing in second language learners.
