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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Second language syntactic processing revealed through event-related potentials: an empirical review.

Sendy Caffarra¹, Nicola Molinaro², Doug Davidson¹

¹BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain.

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

|January 24, 2015

Summary

Second language acquisition (SLA) is vital, but native-like syntactic skills remain challenging. Study reveals L2 immersion duration impacts early processing, while proficiency affects later language monitoring.

Keywords:

AoA Immersion L1–L2 similarity L2 learning L2 syntactic processing Proficiency

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Last Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

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Published on: April 12, 2018

Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Neuroscience of Language
Second Language Acquisition

Background:

Achieving native-like proficiency in a second language (L2) presents significant challenges.
Factors like L1-L2 differences, age of acquisition (AoA), proficiency, immersion, and training duration influence L2 syntactic abilities.
Existing research using online measures has not consistently investigated these factors comprehensively.

Purpose of the Study:

To review event-related potential (ERP) studies on L2 syntactic processing.
To determine the relative influence of various factors on the time course of L2 syntactic analysis.
To elucidate the impact of immersion and proficiency on neural correlates of L2 processing.

Main Methods:

Systematic review of available ERP studies focusing on L2 syntactic violations.
Logistic regression analyses were applied to ERP data.
Factors including L1-L2 differences, AoA, proficiency, immersion duration, and training duration were included as categorical independent variables.

Main Results:

Immersion duration significantly influences ERP correlates associated with early syntactic processing mechanisms.
Global proficiency level impacts ERP correlates related to late language-monitoring activity.
The study quantifies the differential effects of these factors on L2 syntactic processing.

Conclusions:

L2 immersion duration plays a key role in the early stages of syntactic processing.
Higher L2 proficiency is linked to neural activity in later stages of language monitoring.
These findings provide insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying L2 syntactic competence.