Differences between L1 and L2 processing of meaningful sentences revealed by combining EEG and eye tracking

We investigate how native French listeners and advanced Dutch learners of French use visual and auditory information while processing meaningful spoken sentences containing a reduced noun in midsentence position. Using a version of the visual world paradigm combined with EEG recordings, we investigate whether these reduced nouns affect the processing –as evidenced by the EEG signals– of a semantically related noun at the end of the sentence. We also investigate whether a newly developed feature that summarizes the eye movements in some time window affects the processing of those words.
It appears that the reduction status of the first noun affects the processing of the related word and that this effect is different for the two listener groups. We also find that adding the new eye movement feature explains a highly significant amount of the variance in the EEG signals.