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The influence of increasing discourse context on L1 and L2 spoken language processing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2016

TATIANA KOHLSTEDT  and
NIVEDITA MANI
TATIANA KOHLSTEDT*
Affiliation:
Psychology of Language Research Group, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
NIVEDITA MANI
Affiliation:
Psychology of Language Research Group, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
*
Address for correspondence: Dr. Tatiana Kohlstedt, Psychology of Language Junior Research Group, Gosslerstrasse 14, 37073 Goettingen, Germanytatiana.kohlstedt@gmx.de
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Abstract

Using the visual world paradigm, we compared first, L1 and L2 speakers’ anticipation of upcoming information in a discourse and second, L1 and L2 speakers’ ability to infer the meaning of unknown words in a discourse based on the semantic cues provided in spoken language context. It was found that native speakers were able to use the given contextual cues, throughout the discourse, to anticipate upcoming linguistic input and fixate targets consistent with the input thus far, while L2 speakers showed weaker effects of discourse context on target fixations. However, both native speakers and L2 learners alike were able to use contextual information to infer the meaning of unknown words embedded in the discourse and fixate images associated with the inferred meanings of these words, especially given adequate contextual information. We suggest that these results reflect similarly successful integration of the preceding semantic information and the construction of integrated mental representations of the described scenarios in L1 and L2.

Keywords

L2discourseintegrationpredictioneye-tracking
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 121 - 136
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

Supplementary material can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916001139

*

This work was funded by the German Initiative of Excellence (Institutional Strategy). We also acknowledge the Courant Research Centre “Text structures” for their monetary contribution towards participant fees. We thank all the native speakers and German learners who participated in the study and provided us with valuable data. We are also grateful to Jon Andoni Duñabeitia and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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