Grammatical Processing of Spoken Language in Childand Adult Language Learners

摘要

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigatedauditory language processing in children and late second-language (L2) learners using onlinemethods such as event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-movement monitoring, or the cross-modal priming paradigm. Two grammatical phenomena are examined in detail, children'sand adults' processing of German plural inflections (Luck et al. Brain Res 1077:144-152,2006; Hahne et al. J Cognitive Neurosci 18:121-134, 2006; Clahsen et al. J Child Language34:601-622, 2007) and language learners' processing of filler-gap dependencies in English(Felser C, Roberts L Second Language Res 23:9-36, 2007; Roberts et al. J Psycholinguist Res36:175-188, 2007). The results from these studies reveal clear differences between nativeand nonnative processing in both domains of grammar, suggesting that nonnative listenersrely less on grammatical parsing routines during processing than either child or adult nativelisteners. We also argue that factors such as slower processing speed or cognitive resourcelimitations only provide a partial account of our findings.