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AGE OF ONSET, TYPE OF EXPOSURE, AND ULTIMATE ATTAINMENT OF L2 MORPHO-SYNTACTIC SENSITIVITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2019

Eun-Kyoung Rosa Lee*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eun-Kyoung Rosa Lee, 3215 Jimenez Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: ekleesla@umd.edu

Abstract

The present study examined whether early immersive L2 exposure in a foreign language learning context can yield long-term advantages in L2 morpho-syntactic sensitivity. Participants were 40 Korean university students with high English proficiency, who had either attended an English kindergarten or begun learning English in a classroom, and a control group of native English speakers. All participants performed a speeded aural grammaticality judgment task that included the following features: articles, subcategorization, plural -s, third-person -s. Results showed that the English-kindergarten group outperformed the late-classroom group in terms of accuracy for ungrammatical sentences, while the two groups did not differ significantly on grammatical sentences and in reaction time measures. The learners altogether scored higher in plural -s and third-person -s compared to articles. While the native speakers showed near-perfect accuracy and fast reaction times, the highly proficient learners were at near-chance level in detecting morpho-syntactic errors during online L2 aural processing.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Dr. Michael Long for his generous support and encouragement in all stages of the project. I am grateful to all my professors and colleagues in the SLA department at the University of Maryland for their continuous support, including Dr. Steven Ross and Eunsoo Kang for help with data analysis and Natalie Sullivan for recording the stimuli. I thank Dr. Sungeun Lee and Seungcheol Baek (Seoul National University) for their assistance with data collection, and I thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript. Finally, I am grateful for the generous financial support from Kwanjeong Educational Foundation, Korea.

References

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