Doctoral Dissertation Research: ERP Correlates of Morphosyntactic and Word Order Phenomena in Adult Native Speakers and L2 Learners of English

在国家科学基金会的支持下，凯斯勒和她的顾问马托哈德约诺博士将对第二语言学习中常见的三种错误的处理过程进行为期一年的调查。第二语言学习者产生的语法错误的具体来源还没有得到很好的理解。某些持久类型的错误可能与第二语言的语法操作有关。Kessler和Martohardjono将使用大脑电位(ERPs)的时间和空间分布，当人们对句法、形态合成和形态错误做出反应时。这些不同的错误涉及不同的操作：句法错误涉及语序违反，形态合成错误涉及词形变化的省略，形态错误涉及词结构违反。研究人员将比较母语人士和非母语人士在不同熟练程度下的脑电模式，并测试行为数据(通过语法判断检测错误)与与感知这些错误相关的脑电数据之间的相关性。这项研究将有助于我们理解成人第二语言学习中结构信息和屈折信息的习得和加工。此外，它将作为未来对成人和儿童第二语言学习者的调查的基线，这将增强我们对儿童和成人第二语言学习者处理不同类型语言信息的差异的理解。

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Kessler and her advisor Dr. Martohardjono will conduct a year long investigation of the processing of three types of errors commonly observed in second language learning. The specific source of grammatical errors produced by second language learners is not well understood. Certain persistent types of errors may be linked to grammatical operations of the second languages. Kessler and Martohardjono will use timing and spatial distribution of electrical potentials from the brain (ERPs) as people respond to syntactic, morphosyntactic and morphological errors. These different errors involve different kinds of operations: syntactic errors involve word order violations, morphosyntactic errors involve the omission of inflection, and morphological errors involve word structure violations. The investigators will compare brain electrical patterns of native speakers with those of non-native speakers at various levels of proficiency and test of correlations between behavioral data (detection of errors through grammaticality judgements) and brain electrical data associated with the perception of these errors. This research will contribute to our understanding of the acquisition and processing of structural and inflectional information in adult second language learning. Furthermore, it will serve as a baseline for future investigation of both adult and child learners of a second language that will enhance our understanding of differences in how child and adult L2 learners process different types of linguistic information.