Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender information in real-time language use. In an experimental design that crossed production/comprehension and online/offline tasks, highly proficient L2 learners of Spanish performed at ceiling in offline comprehension, showed errors in elicited production, and exhibited weaker use of gender cues in online processing of familiar (though not novel) nouns than native speakers. These findings suggest that persistent difficulty with grammatical gender may not be limited to the realm of language production, but could affect both expressive and receptive use of language in real time. We propose that the observed differences in performance between native and non-native speakers lie at the level of lexical representation of grammatical gender and arise from fundamental differences in how infants and adults approach word learning.

This study examines long-standing claims that L2 learners rely more on non-grammatical than on grammatical information during sentence processing compared to native speakers. Nominal classifiers in Mandarin Chinese offer an ideal opportunity to test this claim, as they simultaneously encode semantic as well as grammatical form-class cues about co-occurring nouns. This paper reports findings from a visual world eye-tracking experiment with L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin, which was designed to assess listeners’ relative reliance on these two concurrently available cues when creating expectations about an upcoming noun in a sentence. Results show that L2 listeners experienced greater competition than L1 listeners from nouns that were grammatically incompatible with the classifier they heard but shared semantic features associated with it. The greater reliance on semantic cues observed in L2 processing is argued to be an effect of adaptation to the relative reliability of information, serving to maximise L2 processing efficiency.

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners performed better than Chinese-speaking learners on clitic-related tasks, indicating a facilitative effect of transfer when the L1 also has object clitics. Yet no evidence was found for (negative) transfer of null objects from Chinese to French, as learners consistently rejected interpretations requiring referential null objects on a receptive task. The frequency of Chinese-speaking learners’ object omissions in production was negatively correlated with an independent measure of working memory (backward digit span), consistent with the hypothesis that object clitic omission is affected by processing limitations. These findings are discussed within a psycholinguistic model of syntactic encoding during language production.

Implicit causality (IC) is a well-known phenomenon whereby certain verbs appear to create biases to remention either their subject or object in a causal dependent clause. This study investigated to what extent Korean learners of English made use of IC information for predictive processing at a discourse level, and whether L2 proficiency played a modulating role in this process. Results from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment showed early use of IC information in both L1 and L2 listeners, yet the effect was weaker and emerged later in the L2 group. None of three independent and intercorrelated proficiency measures modulated L2 listeners’ processing behavior. The findings suggest that L2 listeners are able to engage in prediction during real-time processing at a discourse level, although they did so to a more limited extent than native speakers in this study. We discuss these findings in light of similar evidence from other recent work.

There is ample evidence that language users, including second language (L2) speakers, can predict upcoming information during listening and reading. Yet it is still unclear when, how, and why language users engage in prediction, and what the relation is between prediction and learning. This volume presents a collection of current research, insights and directions regarding the role of prediction in L2 processing and learning. In this introductory chapter, we provide an overview of the current state of the field and highlight that prediction may not always be the most efficient processing mechanism, depending on a language user’s linguistic experience, task demands, goals and resources. We propose that a focus on the utility of prediction may help us better understand differences in predictive processing within and between individuals and groups.

This study examines the use of discourse-level information to create expectations about reference in real-time processing, testing whether patterns previously observed among native speakers of English generalize to nonnative speakers. Findings from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment show that native (L1;N= 53) but not nonnative (L2;N= 52) listeners’ proactive coreference expectations are modulated by grammatical aspect in transfer-of-possession events. Results from an offline judgment task show these L2 participants did not differ from L1 speakers in their interpretation of aspect marking on transfer-of-possession predicates in English, indicating it is not lack of linguistic knowledge but utilization of this knowledge in real-time processing that distinguishes the groups. English proficiency, although varying substantially within the L2 group, did not modulate L2 listeners’ use of grammatical aspect for reference processing. These findings contribute to the broader endeavor of delineating the role of prediction in human language processing in general, and in the processing of discourse-level information among L2 users in particular.