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Article published In:
Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 1:1 (2018) ► pp.31–59

Suprasegmental information cues morphological anticipation during L1/L2 lexical access

| Rutgers University
| Rutgers University

We use visual-world eye-tracking and gating methods to investigate whether Spanish monolinguals and English late learners of Spanish use prosodic cues (lexical stress) to anticipate morphological information (suffixes) during spoken word recognition, and if they do, whether L2 proficiency and working memory (WM) mediate their anticipatory abilities. Our findings show that the monolinguals used prosodic information to predict word endings in both tasks, regardless of first-syllable stress (stressed, unstressed) and structure (CV, CVC). In contrast, the beginning learners did not use prosodic information to anticipate word suffixes in any task or condition. Importantly, the advanced learners mirrored the monolinguals, except in words with first-syllable CV structure, but were slower than the monolinguals. Finally, WM was not associated with anticipatory eye movements, though results were inconclusive for offline processing. Taken together, the present study shows that suprasegmental information facilitates morphological anticipation during spoken word recognition, and that adult learners can gain anticipatory processing patterns qualitatively, but not quantitatively, similar to monolinguals.

Keywords: morphological processing, anticipation, prediction, L2 proficiency, working memory, critical period, prosody, lexical stress
Article outline
  • Prosodic cues in L1 anticipation
  • Prosodic cues in L2 anticipation
  • WM and L2 anticipation
  • Lexical stress in adult SLA
  • The current study
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Materials and procedure
    • Language background questionnaire
    • Spanish proficiency test
    • Eye-tracking task
    • Visual stimuli
    • Auditory stimuli
    • Gating task
    • Working memory task
  • Results
    • Eye-tracking task
  • Gating task
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 7 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.17026.sag
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