The Fine - Tuning of Linguistic Expectations Over the Course of L 2 Learning

This study investigates the degree to which native-English speaking learners of Spanish can generate expectations for information likely to occur in upcoming portions of an unfolding linguistic signal. We examine Spanish Clitic Left Dislocation, a long-distance dependency between a topicalized object and an agreeing clitic, whose felicity depends on the discourse. Using a self-paced reading task, we tested the predictions of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser, 2006a,b) and the Reduced Ability to Generate Expectations hypothesis (RAGE; Grüter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014). Learners successfully demonstrated sensitivity to the violation of expectations set up by the syntactic and discourse context. In addition, the behavior of the L2 learners was dependent on proficiency: the higher their proficiency, the more their behavior mirrored native speaker processing. These results support a view of SLA in which knowledge of L2 discourse-grammatical relationships is acquired slowly over the course of L2 learning.