Online psycholinguistic methods in second language acquisition research

Abstract

Second language acquisition (SLA) research has traditionally used paper-and-pencil tasks, such as grammaticality judgment and completion tasks. In such tasks, participants usually have time to read the whole sentence, they can think and reflect about its form and meaning, and then make a conscious judgment about its grammaticality or how to complete it. This is why these tasks are called offline; that is, the information we get is after the participant has read the whole sentence and has had time to think about it. This is in contrast to online methods that measure how participants process sentences as they unfold word by word or phrase by phrase; that is, these methods measure how participants process sentences in real time. This entry focuses on widely used behavioral online methods, and will provide a short introduction to four such methods recently used in SLA research to address how second language (L2) learners process sentences in real time. These methods are: (a) word monitoring, (b) self-paced reading/listening, (c) cross-modal priming, and (d) self-paced listening with picture verification. Each method is described with examples from key L2 studies. This is followed by a section discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each of these methods. The final section provides a brief overview of eye-tracking, a behavioral method which is gaining popularity in the field, along with its advantages and disadvantages.