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NUMBER ATTRACTION EFFECTS IN NEAR-NATIVE SPANISH SENTENCE COMPREHENSION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2014

Jill Jegerski
Jill Jegerski*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jill Jegerski, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Illinois, MC-176, 707 South Mathews Avenue Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail: jegerski@illinois.edu
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Abstract

Grammatical agreement phenomena such as verbal number have long been of fundamental interest in the study of second language (L2) acquisition. Previous research from the perspective of sentence processing has documented nativelike behavior among nonnative participants but has also relied almost exclusively on grammar violation paradigms. The present investigation examined the online comprehension of subject-verb number agreement by native and nonnative speakers of Mexican Spanish using the more subtle agreement attraction paradigm, with stimuli grammatical in both conditions, in addition to a nonlocal grammaticality paradigm. The results of a self-paced reading experiment confirmed that nonnatives can acquire nativelike online sensitivity to verbal number agreement, even without grammar errors, and that such sensitivity develops only at very high levels of L2 proficiency.

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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 5 - 33
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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