Agents Strongly Preferred: ERP Evidence from Natives and Non-Natives Processing Intransitive Sentences in Spanish

Abstract

Are non-native speakers able to process their second language in a native-like way? The present study used the Event-Related Potentials' (ERPs) method to address this issue by focusing (1) on agent vs. agentless intransitive sentences and (2) on person vs. number agreement morphology. For that purpose, native and high proficiency and early non-native speakers of Spanish were tested while processing intransitive sentences containing grammatical and ungrammatical subject-verb agreement. Results reveal greater accuracy in the agent (unergative) condition as compared with the agentless (unaccusative) condition and different ERP patterns for both types of verbs in all participants, suggesting a larger processing cost for the agentless sentences than for the agentive ones. These effects were more pronounced in the native group as compared with the non-native one in the early time window (300-500 ms). Differences between person and number agreement processing were also found at both behavioral and electrophysiological levels, indicating that those morphological features are distinctively processed. Importantly, this pattern of results held for both native and non-native speakers, thus suggesting that native-like competence is attainable given early Age of Acquisition (AoA), frequent use and high proficiency.

Keywords: ERPs; agents; intransitive sentence processing; non-native language processing; patients.

Figure 1

ERPs elicited at the critical word position in all conditions. Red lines represent the ungrammatical stimuli, while the black lines represent the grammatical stimuli. Significant differences between the grammaticality conditions are highlighted by the blue and red areas. Topographical amplitude difference maps for the grammaticality effect below were calculated as the average subtracting grammatical sentences from ungrammatical ones.