Processing Verb Meanings and the Declarative/Procedural Model: A Developmental Study.

According to the Declarative/Procedural Model, the lexicon depends on declarative memory while grammar relies on procedural memory. Furthermore, procedural memory underlies the sequential processing of language. Thus, this system is important for predicting the next item in a sentence. Verb processing represents a good candidate to test this assumption. Semantic representations of verbs include information about the protagonists in the situations they refer to. This semantic knowledge is acquired implicitly and used during verb processing, such that the processing of a verb preactivates its typical patients (e.g., the window for break). Thus, determining how the patient typicality effect appears during children's cognitive development could provide evidence about the memory system that is dedicated to this effect. Two studies are presented in which French children aged 6-10 and adults made grammaticality judgments on 80 auditorily presented sentences. In Experiment 1, the verb was followed by a typical patient or by a less typical patient. In Experiment 2, grammatical sentences were constructed such that the verb was followed either by a typical patient or by a noun that could not be a patient of that verb. The typicality effect occurs in younger children and is interpreted in terms of developmental invariance. We suggest that this effect may depend on procedural memory, in line with studies that showed that meaning is necessary to allow procedural memory to learn the sequence of words in a sentence.

Sensitivity to Regular and Irregular Past Tense Morphology in Native Speakers and Second Language Learners of English: Evidence From Intermediate-to-Advanced Persian Speakers of L2 English.

This study investigates whether L2 learners (L2ers) use the same mechanisms as those of native English speakers (NSs) for processing regular and irregular past tense forms. Intermediate-to-advanced Persian-English L2ers and NSs participated in two online experiments using Speeded Grammaticality Judgment tasks. Experiment 1 examined regular and irregular past tense forms and Experiment 2 the effect of frequency on regular past tense forms. The results of both the accuracy and reaction time data show a pattern of convergence between NSs and L2ers. Particularly, the accuracy data provide new evidence showing that L2ers converge on NSs in showing distinct processes for regular and irregular tense forms. Additionally, both groups similarly showed an anti-frequency effect for regular verbs, i.e., the frequency increased accuracy rates for low-frequency regular verbs in comparison to high-frequency ones. It is concluded that L2ers use mechanisms similar to those of NSs for processing regular and irregular past tense forms.

Is Adult Second Language Acquisition Defective?

There is a large literature showing that adult L2 learners, in contrast to children, often fail to acquire native-like competence in the second language. Because of such age effects, adult L2 learning is often viewed as "fundamentally different" from child acquisition and defective in some way. However, adult L2 learners do not always do worse than child learners. Several studies (e.g., Sasaki, 1997; Dabrowska and Street, 2006; Street, 2017; Dabrowska, 2019) found considerable overlap between L1 and L2 speakers' performance on tasks tapping morphosyntactic knowledge. Crucially, these studies used grammatical comprehension tasks (e.g., picture selection) to test mastery of "functional" grammar (i.e., grammatical contrasts which correspond to a clear difference in meaning, such as the assignment of agent and patient roles in sentences with noncanonical word order and quantifier scope). In contrast, most ultimate attainment studies (e.g., Johnson and Newport, 1989; Flege et al., 1999; DeKeyser, 2000; DeKeyser et al., 2010) used a grammaticality judgment task (GST) which assessed mastery of "decorative" grammar, i.e., grammatical morphemes such as tense and agreement markers which make relatively little contribution to the meaning conveyed by a sentence. In this study, we directly compared native speakers, late immersion learners, and classroom foreign language learners on tasks assessing both aspects of grammar. As in earlier studies, we found significant differences between native speakers and both non-native groups in performance on "decorative" grammar, particularly when performance was assessed using spoken rather than written stimuli. However, the differences in performance on the "functional" grammar task were much smaller and statistically non-significant. Furthermore, even in the "decorative" grammar task, there was more overlap between native speakers and late L2 learners than reported in earlier research. We argue that this is because earlier studies underestimated the amount of variation found in native speakers.

Corrigendum: Eliciting ERP Components for Morphosyntactic Agreement Mismatches in Perfectly Grammatical Sentences.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01152.].

Eliciting ERP Components for Morphosyntactic Agreement Mismatches in Perfectly Grammatical Sentences.

The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates mechanisms underlying the processing of morphosyntactic information during real-time auditory sentence comprehension in French. Employing an auditory-visual sentence-picture matching paradigm, we investigated two types of anomalies using entirely grammatical auditory stimuli: (i) semantic mismatches between visually presented actions and spoken verbs, and (ii) number mismatches between visually presented agents and corresponding morphosyntactic number markers in the spoken sentences (determiners, pronouns in liaison contexts, and verb-final "inflection"). We varied the type and amount of number cues available in each sentence using two manipulations. First, we manipulated the verb type, by using verbs whose number cue was audible through subject (clitic) pronoun liaison (liaison verbs) as well as verbs whose number cue was audible on the verb ending (consonant-final verbs). Second, we manipulated the pre-verbal context: each sentence was preceded either by a neutral context providing no number cue, or by a subject noun phrase containing a subject number cue on the determiner. Twenty-two French-speaking adults participated in the experiment. While sentence judgment accuracy was high, participants' ERP responses were modulated by the type of mismatch encountered. Lexico-semantic mismatches on the verb elicited the expected N400 and additional negativities. Determiner number mismatches elicited early anterior negativities, N400s and P600s. Verb number mismatches elicited biphasic N400-P600 patterns. However, pronoun + verb liaison mismatches yielded this pattern only in the plural, while consonant-final changes did so in the singular and the plural. Furthermore, an additional sustained frontal negativity was observed in two of the four verb mismatch conditions: plural liaison and singular consonant-final forms. This study highlights the different contributions of number cues in oral language processing and is the first to investigate whether auditory-visual mismatches can elicit errors reminiscent of outright grammatical errors. Our results emphasize that neurocognitive mechanisms underlying number agreement in French are modulated by the type of cue that is used to identify auditory-visual mismatches.

Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging: evidence from subject-verb agreement in German.

Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults' susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.

The role of nonverbal working memory in morphosyntactic processing by school-aged monolingual and bilingual children.

The current study examined the relationship between nonverbal working memory and morphosyntactic processing in monolingual native speakers of English and bilingual speakers of English and Spanish. We tested 42 monolingual children and 42 bilingual children between the ages of 8 and 10years matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Children were administered an auditory Grammaticality Judgment task in English to measure morphosyntactic processing and a visual N-Back task and Corsi Blocks task to measure nonverbal working memory capacity. Analyses revealed that monolinguals were more sensitive to English morphosyntactic information than bilinguals, but the groups did not differ in reaction times or response bias. Furthermore, higher nonverbal working memory capacity was associated with greater sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations in bilinguals but not in monolinguals. The findings suggest that nonverbal working memory skills link more tightly to syntactic processing in populations with lower levels of language knowledge.

Is grammar spared in autism spectrum disorder? Data from judgments of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 11-13 (N = 16) and an IQ-matched typically developing (TD) group aged 7-12 (N = 16) completed a graded grammaticality judgment task, as well as a standardized test of cognitive function. In a departure from previous studies, the judgment task involved verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Lisa fell the cup off the shelf) of the type sometimes observed amongst typically developing children, as well as grammatical control sentences with the same verbs (e.g., The cup fell off the shelf). The ASD group showed a smaller dispreference for ungrammatical sentences (relative to the control sentences) than did the TD group. These findings are indicative of a subtle grammatical impairment in even relatively high-functioning children with ASD.