Third-person singular -s in L2 English: Sentence position effects and the dissociation between online and offline performance

Abstract

Abstract L2 learners’ difficulty with English third-person singular (3SG) -s has been attributed either to processing limitations or to representational deficits, but evidence bearing directly on this distinction in real-time comprehension remains limited. Sundara et al. (2011, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 54(1), 55–71) showed that 3SG -s is harder for L1-English children to perceive in sentence-medial than in sentence-final position, a pattern suggesting greater phonetic prominence of the morpheme sentence-finally, but comparable L2 evidence is lacking. The present study examined sentence-position effects and online – offline dissociation in L2 English 3SG -s by combining a visual-world eye-tracking task and an offline fill-in-the-blank task. Eye-tracking data from 24 L1-English controls and 23 L1-Korean L2-English learners revealed that, in the singular conditions, both groups processed 3SG -s more slowly in sentence-medial than in sentence-final position. Relative to native speakers, L2 learners also showed delayed target fixations and lower picture-selection accuracy. Crucially, the same learners performed at near-ceiling levels in the fill-in-the-blank task, revealing a clear online – offline dissociation. These results suggest that sensitivity to 3SG -s is less stable under real-time auditory processing demands than in offline written tasks. Overall, the findings are more consistent with processing-based accounts than with strong representational-deficit accounts.