Please join us for the next CLLEAR seminar on Wednesday (19 March) 5.00pm (Avenue Campus Lecture Theatre C).

Dr. Cecile De Cat from University of Leeds.

Title: Representational deficit or processing effect? An RT study of noun-noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English

Abstract: Noun-noun compounds (NNCs) are syntactic structures that vary cross-linguistically in terms of headedness and productivity.  The interpretive relation between the nouns is determined by phrasal semantics, and does not depend on information structure or pragmatics. In English, no morphology is needed to encode that relation.  NNCs are a core-grammar phenomenon ‘par excellence’, predicted not to induce L1 effects in highly proficient L2ers (Slabakova 2008, Sorace 2011). We investigate the processing of NNCs in adult L2 in terms of accuracy, reaction time (RT – Study 1) and Event Related Potentials (ERP – study 2).  The aim of the studies is to distinguish potential representational deficits from processing difficulties.

All welcome!