2025/12/16 by Manuel F. Pulido, Priscila López‐Beltrán, Paola E. Dussias +1 · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism #Second Language Acquisition and Learning #Reading and Literacy Development
paper · doi:10.1177/02676583251396348
Research has revealed substantial individual differences in how language is processed during reading by both first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) speakers, with morphosyntax in particular being identified as a ‘bottleneck’ area in L2 acquisition. While some predictors of reading performance are well studied (e.g. working memory, individual word knowledge), recent research has suggested a role for multiword unit chunking ability in L1 sentence processing. However, the role of chunking ability in L2 processing has received less attention. This study explores chunking as a particularly relevant mechanism for the processing of L2 Spanish gender agreement, during which nouns and gender-marking cues in determiners and adjectives must be chunked together. We examined whether chunking ability and working memory predict syntactic processing involving gender agreement in Spanish during a self-paced reading task. We created a Spanish version of a multiword chunk sensitivity task and used it to obtain measures of chunking ability from English learners of Spanish in both languages. Results revealed no significant effect of working memory, while L1 chunking ability predicted L2 processing: only higher-chunking-ability learners showed sensitivity to gender agreement during processing, even after controlling for proficiency; lower-chunking-ability readers showed a lack of sensitivity to agreement during online processing.