Holger Hopp* Semantics and morphosyntax in predictive L2 sentence processing DOI 10.1515/iral-2015-0014 Abstract: In the context of current approaches to anticipation in native and non-native sentence processing, this paper investigates whether late second- language (L2) learners integrate morphosyntax, i.e. case marking, and verb semantics to generate anticipations in L2 sentence comprehension. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment with 45 L1 English L2 learners of German and 12 German natives, German natives are found to integrate mor- phosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in anticipatory processing, while L2 learners only rely on lexical-semantic information for prediction. Moreover, there is no indication that increasing proficiency leads to the involvement of morphosyntax in predictive L2 processing. We discuss reasons for the lower sensitivity to morphosyntax in anticipatory L2 sentence processing. Keywords: L2 processing, morphosyntax, anticipation, L2 acquisition 1 Introduction Language comprehension involves the rapid integration of different types of information. Listeners incrementally combine lexical, morphosyntactic, seman- tic and contextual-pragmatic information to build an evolving representation of the incoming signal. As recent work on native language processing shows, though, listeners and readers do not just passively integrate information to reconstruct linguistic meaning, they proactively construct interpretations by generating anticipations on the basis of the information they integrated. Anticipation plays a central role in current approaches to sentence comprehen- sion (Altmann and Mirkovic 2009; Federmeier 2007; Gibson 1998; Kamide 2008; Levy 2008; Pickering and Garrod 2013) and has been characterized as the driving force for incremental processing (Altmann and Mirkovic 2009) as well as effi- cient communication (Jaeger and Snider 2013). To this end, native speakers rapidly integrate grammatical and non-linguistic information to form predictions in language processing (e.g. Huettig et al. 2011). *Corresponding author: Holger Hopp, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany, E-mail: hhopp@rumms.uni-mannheim.de IRAL 2015; 53(3): 277–306 Brought to you by | University of Toronto-Ocul Authenticated Download Date | 11/15/15 3:51 PM