lnu.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Second language acquisition in children and adults: ERP studies of phonological awareness, semantics, and syntax
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Swedish Language.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6731-1522
2017 (English)In: Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC) Colloquium 2017, 2017Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Whereas behavioral studies of L2 acquisition in children are abundant little is known about second language (L2) processing in development neurocognitively. Indeed, neurocognitive studies of L2 processing typically are limited to adults with several years of exposure, who may use general cognitive mechanisms to compensate for any difficulties in L2 processing. Research on bilingual adults suggests that age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency have different effects on different aspects of L2 processing. In addition to AoA and proficiency, neurocognitive studies have also reported on crosslinguistic influence (CLI) in morphosyntactic L2 processing. These studies typically report that learners display nativelike L2-processing when structures are similar to that of their own native language.

I will present studies where we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in order to index processing of phonological awareness (Rhyming effect: RE), semantics (N400), and syntax (LAN, P600) in bilingual and monolingual children 6-8 years of age. In addition, I will present a study of CLI effects of processing of L2-syntax. Even though behaviorally, bilingual children with an average AoA of 4 years had lower English proficiency than monolingual children, proficiency predicted similar differences in ERPs across groups. However, other differences in the ERPs waveforms were related to AoA rather than proficiency. These differences were restricted to phonological awareness and syntax. Adults with similar L2-Swedish proficiency differed in their processing depending on if their first language had similar syntax (verb second, German learners) or not (English learners).

The results from the studies that will be presented suggest early acquisition is important for processing of rhyming and for more automatic syntactic processing while proficiency is important for semantics and for controlled aspects of syntactic processing in children and that CLI can affect syntactic processing in late adult learners of a language.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017.
Keywords [en]
L2, talk, ERP, language processing, children, adults, bilingual
National Category
Languages and Literature
Research subject
Humanities
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-70846OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-70846DiVA, id: diva2:1188760
Conference
Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC) Colloquium 2017
Note

Invited Talk

Available from: 2018-03-08 Created: 2018-03-08 Last updated: 2018-05-11Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Other links

Abstract

Authority records

Andersson, Annika

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Andersson, Annika
By organisation
Department of Swedish Language
Languages and Literature

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 960 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf