Growing Anticipatory Connections during Online Processing: The Use of Grammatical Gender Cues in L2 French

The real-time processing of linguistic input involves the rapid integration of many types of information, including various linguistic (e.g., syntactic, morphological, prosodic) and nonlinguistic cues (e.g., real-world knowledge, lexical frequency) that can be used to predict upcoming information. Processing seems facilitated when expectations are met but inhibited when they are not (e.g., DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007; Martin, Thierry, Kuipers, Boutonnet, Bastien, Foucart, & Costa, 2103; Van Berkum, Brown, Zwisterlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005; Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004). Despite the occasional failed prediction, proactive comprehension is argued to be fundamental to the human language processing system (e.g., Federmeier, 2007; Pickering & Garrod, 2007, 2013), contributing to the efficiency with which linguistic input is comprehended in real time (e.g., Kuperberg, 2013; Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Van Petten & Luka, 2012). Furthermore, prediction in language processing seems to play an important role in language acquisition (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006; Fodor, 1998). In experimental studies examining anticipation in sentence processing, native speakers (NSs) have demonstrated effective use of various information sources to anticipate upcoming content (e.g., Dahan, Swingley, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2000; DeLong et al., 2005; Federmeier, 2007). In contrast, research on predictive processing in a second language (L2) suggests that non-native speakers may not reliably be able to exploit the same types of information in the same ways (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010; Grüter, Lew-Williams, & Fernald, 2012; Martin et al., 2103; see Kaan, 2014, for a review). This has led Grüter, Rohde, and Shafer (2014) to suggest that L2 learners experience a reduced ability to generate expectations (RAGE) in real time. Of course, L2 processing has been argued to differ from native or first language (L1) processing in other ways, both quantitative—the deployment of processing mechanisms seems delayed in L2 (e.g., Boxell & Felser, 2017; Dekydtspotter, Schwartz, & Sprouse, 2006), and cognitive resources are allocated to the various components of real-time processing in different ways (e.g., Hopp, 2010; McDonald, 2006)—and qualitative—L2 processing seems to rely less on structural information, prioritizing non-structural information (see Clahsen & Felser, 2017, for an overview and update of their Shallow Structure Hypothesis). Weakly activated L2 lexical representations may also contribute to L1-L2 processing differences (Dekydtspotter & Miller, 2013). The current study uses eye-tracking to investigate the relationship between anticipation and processing speed (Foucart, Martin, Moreno, & Costa, 2014; Wlotko & Federmeier, 2015) in L2 sentence processing, specifically, in the use of cues to the grammatical gender of an upcoming noun among classroom L2 learners of French. Whereas NSs can use grammatical gender information (encoded, for example, in masculine or feminine determiner forms) to anticipate upcoming nouns, adult L2 learners seem less sensitive to this grammatical gender information (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010; Grüter et al., 2012), although this has been shown to vary with proficiency or with congruency between L1 and L2 gender systems (Dussias, Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo, & Gerfen, 2013; Hopp & Lemmerth, 2016). Given that online processing is slower and more effortful in a L2 (e.g., McDonald, 2006), and that processing speed can affect anticipation during sentence processing (Wlotko & Federmeier, 2015), it could be the case that even lower proficiency L2 learners would be able to use grammatical gender information if they had more time to generate an expectation (Foucart et al., 2014). The current study