Providing some more pieces to the puzzle : L2 adults, L2 children and children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Although the role of parsing for language acquisition has long been recognized (e.g., Fodor, 1998), empirical research on sentence processing in populations whose language abilities are still developing was sparse until about fifteen years ago when Clahsen and colleagues conducted the project ‘The development of language processing’. This led to a series of influential studies on sentence processing in monolingual (L1) children (Felser, Marinis, & Clahsen, 2003a; Roberts, Marinis, & Clahsen, 2007) and adult second language (L2) learners (Felser, Roberts, Marinis, & Gross, 2003b; Felser & Roberts, 2007; Marinis, Roberts, Felser, & Clahsen, 2005) and the formulation of the Shallow Surface Hypothesis (SSH) (Clahsen & Felser, 2006). The SSH sparked controversy in L2 acquisition research and led to the explosion of language processing studies in adult L2 learners, many of which are presented in the keynote paper by Phillips & Ehrenhofer (2015) (henceforth P&E). Compared to adult L2 processing research, research on language processing in L1 children is still limited, and even more limited are studies on processing in L2 children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Research in these populations is crucial if we want to understand the role of language processing in language acquisition, which is the aim of P&E’s keynote paper. In this commentary I will add some more pieces to the puzzle P&E address by reporting recent findings on the role of immersion in adult L2 processing and discussing results on language processing in L2 children and children with SLI in relation to reanalysis and predictive parsing. The paper will conclude with a note on the need to compare on-­‐line comprehension with production.