Native and Non-native Speakers' Brain Responses to Filled Indirect Object Gaps.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience of Language
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Understanding how the brain processes grammatical dependencies is crucial for psycholinguistics.
• Investigating sentence comprehension in non-native speakers sheds light on language processing mechanisms and potential differences from native speakers.
• Indirect object dependencies present a complex syntactic structure that can reveal nuances in language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural correlates of processing indirect object wh-dependencies in both native and non-native English speakers.
• To compare the sentence comprehension strategies employed by native English speakers and proficient non-native (German-speaking) English speakers.
• To identify event-related potential (ERP) differences associated with linking fronted indirect objects and resolving filled gaps.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a filled-gap paradigm to examine the processing of indirect object wh-dependencies.
• Recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from native English speakers and proficient non-native German-speaking English speakers.
• Analyzed ERP components such as the N400, left-anterior negativity (LAN), and P600 to infer processing stages.

Main Results:

• Both groups exhibited an N400 component, suggesting successful linking of fronted indirect objects to the verb.
• Non-native speakers displayed a prolonged left-anterior negativity (LAN), indicating continued filler activation beyond the verb.
• Both groups showed a P600 response to filled indirect object gaps, with this effect being more pronounced in non-native speakers.

Conclusions:

• Sentence comprehension involving indirect object dependencies is a two-step process for both native and non-native speakers.
• Non-native English speakers incur greater processing costs compared to native speakers when resolving these dependencies.
• ERP data reveal distinct neural signatures for late-stage processing in non-native language comprehension.