Doctoral Dissertation Research: ERP Correlates of Morphosyntactic and Word Order Phenomena in Adult Native Speakers and L2 Learners of English

Cuny Graduate School University Center, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Kessler and her advisor Dr. Martohardjono will conduct a year long investigation of the processing of three types of errors commonly observed in second language learning. The specific source of grammatical errors produced by second language learners is not well understood. Certain persistent types of errors may be linked to grammatical operations of the second languages. Kessler and Martohardjono will use timing and spatial distribution of electrical potentials from the brain (ERPs) as people respond to syntactic, morphosyntactic and morphological errors. These different errors involve different kinds of operations: syntactic errors involve word order violations, morphosyntactic errors involve the omission of inflection, and morphological errors involve word structure violations. The investigators will compare brain electrical patterns of native speakers with those of non-native speakers at various levels of proficiency and test of correlations between behavioral data (detection of errors through grammaticality judgements) and brain electrical data associated with the perception of these errors. This research will contribute to our understanding of the acquisition and processing of structural and inflectional information in adult second language learning. Furthermore, it will serve as a baseline for future investigation of both adult and child learners of a second language that will enhance our understanding of differences in how child and adult L2 learners process different types of linguistic information.