On 18 September Phaedra Royle, Université de Montréal, will give a talk on Neurocognitive maturation in gender-agreement processing at Linnaeus University.
Time: 16.15-17.30
Location: Sven (Fe2038b) Department of Swedish, Linnaeus University, or zoom:
Abstract
Recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research has shown that grammars might consolidate at the end of grade-school or even up to young adulthood. Some aspects of language processing and grammar consolidation appear to be impacted by morphological regularity or salience (Cantiani et al., 2013; Dube et al., 2018) and thus show delayed consolidation during early and late teenage years. ERP patterns elicited in children who are still acquiring their first language (L1) can resemble that of second-language (L2) learners at these stages, for example eliciting N400s instead of adult-like LANs for grammatical errors (Clahsen et al., 2007; Dube et al., 2018; Tippmann et al., 2018). I will present ERP studies investigating gender-agreement processing in French children, (pre-)teens, and adults that reveal a pattern of grammar maturation from age 4 to 20 and beyond, with components being impacted by age, proficiency and linguistic properties such as morphophonological regularity and salience, providing an intricate picture of language acquisition in L1 that has parallels with with ERP patterns for L2 learning observed in adults (see e.g., Steinhauer, 2014).
References
Cantiani, C., Lorusso, M. L., Perego, P., Molteni, M., & Guasti, M. T. (2013). Event-related potentials reveal anomalous morphosyntactic processing in developmental dyslexia. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34, 1135–1162. doi.org/10.1017/S0142716412000185
Clahsen, H., Lück, M., & Hahne, A. (2007). How children process over-regularizations: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Child Language, 34, 601–622. doi.org/ß10.1017/S0305000907008082
Dube, S., Kung, C., Brock, J., & Demuth, K. (2018). Perceptual salience and the processing of subject-verb agreement in 9-11-year-old English-speaking children: Evidence from ERPs. Language Acquisition, 26, 73–96. doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2017.1394305
Steinhauer, K. (2014). Event-related potentials (ERPs) in second language research: A brief introduction to the technique, a selected review, and an invitation to reconsider critical periods in L2. Applied Linguistics, 4(35), 393-417. doi.org/10.1093/applin/amu028
Tippmann, J., Stärk, K., Ebersberg, M., Opitz, A., & Rossi, S. (2018). Developmental changes in neuronal processing of irregular morphosyntactic rules during childhood. Paper presented at the 8th IMPRS NeuroCom Summer School, Leipzig, Germany.
Contact: Annika Andersson, Linnaeus University, annika.anderssonlnuse