The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English-Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2 present or not present in the first language (n...

A considerable number of studies have hitherto examined how native speakers and second language (hereafter L1 and L2, respectively) learners of English process English prepositional phrases. It is usually thought that both L1 and L2 speakers have a preference for verb phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke the old window with a ball of snow.) over noun phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke...

Plasticity in the honeybee brain has been studied using the appetitive olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex, in which a bee learns the association between an odor and a sucrose reward. In this framework, coupling behavioral measurements of proboscis extension and invasive recordings of neural activity has been difficult because proboscis movements usually introduce brain mov...

Grammatical gender is one of the most difficult aspects to acquire in a latelearned second language (L2), especially for learners whose first language does not have grammatical gender, e.g. English (Franceschina, 2005). There are two aspects of gender that present challenges to learners: First, learners need to learn the target gender of individual nouns, i.e. they need to assign a noun (e.g. S...

In this study we investigate the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) on grammatical processing in second language learners as measured by event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We compare a traditional analysis involving the calculation of averages across a certain time window of the ERP waveform, analyzed with categorical groups (early vs. late), with a generalized additive modeling analysis, w...