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Integrating discourse information in a second language: Evidence from event-related potentials

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Alison Gabriele1 (gabriele@ku.edu), Münir Özturhan1, José Alemán-Bañón2, Andrew Collins3, Braden Swaim1, Xiao Yang4, Manuel Carreiras5, Simona Mancini5, Lesa Hoffman6, Robert Fiorentino1; 1University of Kansas, 2Stockholm University, 3University of Texas at Austin, 4Northeastern University, 5Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 6University of Iowa

Second language (L2) learners have been observed to struggle in the integration of discourse information during referential processing, but the source of the difficulty is not well understood (e.g., Sorace, 2011). We examine whether the ability to update the discourse context is one possible source of divergence between native speakers (L1) and L2 learners. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the processing of overt pronouns (she) in Spanish-speaking learners of English in Spain (n=40) and English native speakers (n=28) and in three contexts: Baseline (Condition 1): an unambiguous context where the pronoun can be resolved using a gender cue (e.g., 'she' refers to Kate not Adam), Ambiguous (Condition 2): a context where the pronoun is ambiguous because there are two gender-matching accessible antecedents (Kate/Annie), and Updating (Condition 3): a context where there are two gender-matching potential antecedents in the story (Kate/Annie) but only one is accessible (Kate) because the other individual ultimately does not participate in the activity described in the discourse. We examined whether participants yielded an Nref, an ERP component linked to referential ambiguity, in the ambiguous Condition 2 as compared to the Baseline, but not in Condition 3, where only one antecedent is ultimately accessible. L1-English speakers yielded a significant negativity (400-800ms) in Condition 2, but not in Condition 3. In contrast, L2-English learners yielded significant negativities in this time window in both Conditions 2 and 3 suggesting that learners are sensitive to referential ambiguity but have difficulty integrating information from the discourse to resolve it.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic

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