AGE OF ONSET, TYPE OF EXPOSURE, AND ULTIMATE ATTAINMENT OF L2 MORPHO-SYNTACTIC SENSITIVITY

The present study examined whether early immersive L2 exposure in a foreign language learning context can yield long-term advantages in L2 morpho-syntactic sensitivity. Participants were 40 Korean university students with high English proficiency, who had either attended an English kindergarten or b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inStudies in second language acquisition Vol. 42; no. 4; pp. 801 - 823
Main Author Lee, Eun-Kyoung Rosa
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.09.2020
Subjects
Accuracy
Age of onset
Classrooms
College Students
Educational Environment
Educational Policy
English as a second language learning
English proficiency
Error Patterns
Foreign Countries
Foreign language learning
Grammar
Grammaticality
Hypotheses
Immersion programs
Judgment
Kindergarten
Korean language
Language acquisition
Language Proficiency
Language Tests
Learning environment
Morphemes
Oral Language
Person
Reaction Time
Research Article
Second Language Instruction
Second Language Learning
Sentences
Syntactic processing
Syntax
South Korea
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Summary:The present study examined whether early immersive L2 exposure in a foreign language learning context can yield long-term advantages in L2 morpho-syntactic sensitivity. Participants were 40 Korean university students with high English proficiency, who had either attended an English kindergarten or begun learning English in a classroom, and a control group of native English speakers. All participants performed a speeded aural grammaticality judgment task that included the following features: articles, subcategorization, plural -s, third-person -s. Results showed that the English-kindergarten group outperformed the late-classroom group in terms of accuracy for ungrammatical sentences, while the two groups did not differ significantly on grammatical sentences and in reaction time measures. The learners altogether scored higher in plural -s and third-person -s compared to articles. While the native speakers showed near-perfect accuracy and fast reaction times, the highly proficient learners were at near-chance level in detecting morpho-syntactic errors during online L2 aural processing.
ISSN:0272-2631
1470-1545
DOI:10.1017/S0272263119000731