Session 7B

This study investigates sensitivities to non-target-like use of 3rd person singular -s (3ps) in L2 English with self-paced reading-time (RT) data. We found that Japanese learners of English (JLEs) showed different sensitivities between not only [person] and [number] but also 1st person and 2nd/3rd person.
Previous research has suggested JLEs are more sensitive to a mismatch in [person] than in [number] (Wakabayashi, 2013). However, the ungrammatical test items in those studies always contained 1st and 2nd person subject pronouns (e.g., You in *You speaks English) but full noun phrases for 3rd person plural subjects (e.g., *The studentsspeaks English). Hence, the observed asymmetry may lie in differences between pronouns and noun phrases rather than between [person] and [number] features. Wakabayashi et al. (2021) resolved this uncertainty using materials with sentential subjects that were all pronouns and demonstrated that Taiwanese learners of English (TLEs) show the same asymmetry between omission and overuse, and also between [person] and [number].
This study examines whether JLEs show the same asymmetries as TLEs. Materials were adopted from Wakabayashi et al. (2021): four types of grammatical/ungrammatical sentences (1) in two lists, of which each participant was exposed to only one. Note that the critical point for grammaticality was always in an embedded clause, and sentential subjects were pronouns in all sentences. 

 a. I know that I like/*likes ....
 b. I realize that you hate/*hates ....
 c. I'm sure that she *know/knows ....
 d. I think that they need/*needs ....


Eight tokens of each type were included along with an equal number of distractors. Sensitivity to ungrammaticality was measured with RT in a word-by-word non-cumulative self-paced reading task with moving windows. Forty-seven JLEs participated in the experiment. The data were compared with data from 20 TLEs and 28 native speakers of English in Wakabayashi et al. (2021). A Linear Mixed Effect Model analysis showed that JLEs differed partially from TLEs: Although neither JLEs nor TLEs were sensitive to omission errors (1c) or overuse errors with number violations (1d), JLEs were sensitive to overuse of 3ps -s when the subject was 1st person (1a) but not 2nd person (1b), while TLEs were sensitive to both 1st and 2nd person agreement violations. We attribute this difference between groups to their first languages: Japanese has subject-verb agreement in honorific, modal, and benefactive expressions which differentiates 1st person from the others while Chinese does not. We also contend that TLEs' behavior is due to intrinsic/optional differences between [person] and [number] agreement as proposed in Wakabayashi et al (2021).

References

Wakabayashi, S. (2013). Why do we need a linguistic theory to describe learners' behaviors? Second Language 12, 81–108. 
Wakabayashi, S., Kimura, T., Matthews, J., Akimoto, T., Hokari, T., Yamazaki, T. & K. Otaki. (2021). Asymmetry between Person and Number Features in L2 Subject-Verb Agreement. Proceedings of Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 45: 735–745.

Speakers of languages with strict Subject-Verb-Object word order may use verb-semantics (e.g., eat) to predict an upcoming object (e.g., cake) (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999), whereas speakers of languages with flexible word order (e.g., Turkish) may also rely on case-marking cues (e.g., Özge et al., 2019). Whether bilingual speakers use similar predictive processing strategies as monolinguals has been investigated with bilingual children in few studies (e.g., Brouwer et al., 2017); however, little is known about the end-state of these prediction abilities in bilingual adults.
The current study investigated to what extent bilingual adults are similarly able to use case-marking on the first noun phrase (NP1) to predict the second noun phrase (NP2) as monolinguals. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, 24 Turkish monolingual adults (Mage=26.33, SD=6.25) and 25 Turkish-Dutch bilingual adults (Mage=26.68, SD=5.21) listened to Turkish sentences in which case-marking on NP1 (accusative/nominative) and verb position (sentence-medial/sentence-final, counterbalanced) were manipulated (see Table 1), while looking at a visual scene with three pictures (cf. Özge et al., 2019). The pictures represented the NP1 (e.g., rabbit), a plausible patient in a context where NP1 was the agent (e.g., carrot), and a plausible agent in a context where NP1 was the patient (e.g., fox).
Fixations to agent versus patient pictures were analyzed by using mixed effect logistic regression during the time window between NP1 and NP2. The results showed a significant interaction between Time, Condition (accusative vs. nominative), and Group (monolingual vs. bilingual) in both the verb-final (β=-0.45, SE=0.05, z-value=-9.98, p< .001) and the verb-medial condition (β=-0.30, SE=0.04, z-value=-7.84, p< .001). In the verb-final condition, a significant interaction between Time and Condition demonstrated a prediction effect for monolinguals (β=0.26, SE=0.03, z-value=8.68, p< .001), but not for bilinguals (β=-0.19, SE=0.03, z-value=-5.61, p< .001), as shown in Figure1.pdf. In the verb-medial condition, a significant interaction between Time and Condition revealed a prediction effect for both monolinguals (β=0.41, SE=0.02, z-value=17.25, p< .001) and bilinguals (β=0.12, SE=0.03, z-value=3.88, p< .001), though smaller in magnitude for bilinguals (see Figure2.pdf).
In conclusion, the results suggest that Turkish-Dutch bilingual adults are able to use case-marking cues predictively when integrated with verb-semantics (i.e., verb-medial condition), but not when presented alone (i.e., verb-final condition). These findings provide evidence for the use of morphosyntactic cues in predictive processing of bilinguals whose languages do not use the same type of cues.
References
Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73, 247–264. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00059-1
Brouwer, S., Özkan, D., & Küntay, A. C. (2017). Semantic prediction in monolingual and bilingual children. In E. Blom, L. Cornips, & J. Schaeffer (Eds.), Cross-linguistic Influence in Bilingualism, (pp. 48-73). John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi:10.1075/sibil.52.04bro
Özge, D., Küntay, A., & Snedeker, J. (2019). Why wait for the verb? Turkish speaking children use case markers for incremental language comprehension. Cognition, 183, 152–180. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.10.026