How do learners process continuous and discontinuous relations?

Reading and understanding a text in L2 can be a cognitively demanding task. While the impact of discourse connectives and alternative signals is rather well documented for L1 speakers, the literature about the reading processing of connectives of language learners is yet relatively sparse. Among the few studies that assessed the processing of discourse relations in L2, the recent findings by Zufferey and Gygax (2017) and Recio Fernández (2020) demonstrate that even highly proficient L2 readers fail to detect incoherencies during online reading when they have to process implicit discontinuous relations (e.g., concessive and confirmation relations), as predicted by the continuity principle (Segal et al., 1991; Murray, 1995, 1997) as well as the causality-by-default assumption (Sanders, 2005). However, results from these experiments also raise intriguing questions that we address in a new set of experiments. First, we do not know yet at which proficiency level learners acquire a native-like ability to process continuous and discontinuous discourse relations. Second, learners’ ability to process continuous and discontinuous relations might depend on the frequency and register of the connective that conveys it. It can be assumed that connectives which are not common in speech might represent, especially for untrained speakers and readers, an added complexity to text processing. Since working memory is used for the encoding these unusual elements, less proficient L2 learners should not able to detect a loss of coherence within the already demanding discontinuous relations. Finally, previous experiments showed no evidence for an interaction effect between the type of relation (causal or concessive) and the nature of the link (explicit or implicit). In other words, there is no evidence that for example a discontinuous relation is processed more slowly by non-native speakers when the link is implicit compared to a continuous relation. In a set of three experiments, we will assess the way German-speaking learners of French process relations by means of a self-paced-reading-task, by comparing coherent and incoherent relations (Experiment 1), explicit and implicit relations (Experiment 2) and relations that are conveyed by a frequent or an infrequent connective (Experiment 3). Whereas both Zufferey and Gygax (2017) as well as Recio Fernández (2020) tested highly frequent connectives in French and Spanish, we focus in Experiment 3 on infrequent connectives that are bound to the written mode. By doing so, we gain further insight into the impact of the connectives’ characteristics on online text processing in L2. We will further assess the participants’ language proficiency using the French version of the Lextale-task (Brysbaert, 2013) which showed in previous experiments high correlations with an offline sentence-completion-task with discourse connectives, as well as with a grammar task (Zufferey & Gygax, 2020). We will also link L2 learners’ ability to process French connectives to their degree of exposure to print in their native language, as this factor was found to be relevant in offline tasks with native (Zufferey & Gygax, 2020) and non-native speakers (Wetzel, Zufferey & Gygax, 2020)