Research project Predictive processing in Swedish as a second language

Predictive processing generally refers to a speaker's ability to generate expectations of upcoming input, which can occur on multiple linguistic levels spanning from the semantic to the phonological. This project focuses in the morphosyntactic level, examining to what extent L2 speakers of Swedish can predict based on grammatical gender.

Gender is a difficult property for learners to acquire. While learning to categorize nouns correctly is one thing, developing your grammar to levels where that knowledge is used in real time, is another. Recent research has come to suggest that L2 speakers can use gender to predict, even when the feature is not present in the L1. However, this ability seems to be modulated by different linguistic and individual factors. This project examines how markedness and early L1 experience modulate a learner's ability to predict. These questions are examined through experimental studies using both behavioral and brain imaging methods.