The role of crosslinguistic differences in second language anticipatory processing: An event-related potentials study

The present study uses event-related potentials to investigate how crosslinguistic (dis)similarities modulate anticipatory processing in the second language (L2). Participants read predictive stories English that made a genitive construction consisting of third-person singular possessive pronoun and kinship noun (e.g., his mother) likely an upcoming continuation. pronoun's form depended on antecedent's natural gender, which had been previously established stories. continuation included either expected or unexpected one with opposite gender. We manipulated (dis)similarity by comparing advanced learners Swedish Spanish as their L1. While has equivalent pronouns mark gender (i.e., hans/hennes “his/her”), does not. In fact, syntactic features (number, gender) possessed nosotros queremos nuestra madre “we-MASC love our-FEM mother-FEM). Twenty-four native speakers elicited N400 effect for prenominal possessives were based possessor noun's consistent possibility they activated its semantic (natural gender). Thirty-two Swedish-speaking yielded qualitatively quantitatively native-like possessives. contrast, twenty-five Spanish-speaking showed P600 possessives, experienced difficulty integrating mismatched Results suggest differences respect encoded representation result different mechanisms among adult L2 learners.