Gauging sensitivity to grammaticality violations of adpositional phrases

Abstract

Research on in third mostly centers around early stages of development, and little is known on after the . This study explores of in L3 to examine sensitivity to violations of as a function of in the L3 development process. The study aims to investigate whether two groups of subjects (L1-/L2- L3 learners of English and L1-Turkish L2 learners of English) are sensitive to violations of grammaticality in the of English at an intermediate level of proficiency and whether they can access implicit knowledge of during real-time in a task. Bayesian multilevel were carried out to estimate potential sensitivity to violations. Results suggest that L3 learners are sensitive to violations of in conditions in which ungrammatical items were presented as their L1 shares structural similarities with the system of English. Such sensitivity was not found in the L2 learner group whose L1 does not have any structural overlaps with the adpositional system of English. For L3 learners, reading times in the critical region were slower when the sentence cued a violation rather than when it did not. Slower reading times to violations spilled over onto the post-critical region. In addition to online sensitivity, post-sentence grammaticality judgements were also indicative of sensitivity to by L3 learners. Overall results suggest that performance differences between the two groups can be explained by structural similarities and typological proximity between the L3 and the L1 of the group. Only L3 participants whose L1 has as part of its adpositional system seemed to be sensitive to the online, and thus, could be argued to benefit from the facilitation of .