| The present study reports the findings of two self-paced reading tasks (N = 98). The primary experiment (subjunctive task) investigated the effects of lexical preference on L1 Spanish and L2 Spanish readers' processing of the subjunctive during online sentence processing. Participants of various proficiency levels (intermediate, high intermediate, advanced and native Spanish speakers) read sentences that were either +/-Form or +/-Meaning. The variable "Form" was operationalized as a (mis)match between the lexical expression of modality in the main clause of a sentence and the mood marker (indicative or subjunctive) on the subordinate verb. The variable "Meaning" was operationalized as a (mis)match between the lexical-semantics of the subordinate verb in a sentence and the action or situation depicted in a corresponding image. The secondary experiment (local agreement task) investigated the same learners' processing of localized subject-verb agreement violations during online sentence processing. The results of the subjunctive task revealed that only native speakers demonstrated sensitivity (i.e., increased reading times as measured via a self-paced reading methodology) to modality-mood mismatches (+/-Form). Intermediate through advanced-level L2 learners demonstrated sensitivity to sentence-image mismatches (+/-Meaning) only. In the local agreement task, only intermediate L2 learners were not sensitive to grammaticality violations. These findings are discussed in light of the Lexical Preference Principle (VanPatten, 2004, 2007) and the Shallow Structures Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c). |
