ERP evidence for different strategies employed by native speakers and L2 learners in sentence processing

Considerable neurophysiological research has been conducted to explore the neural underpinning of semantic and syntactic processing, but few studies aim to reveal which kind of information (semantic or syntactic) is more important in sentence comprehension. The current study, by using the event related potentials (ERPs), investigated strategies employed by English native speakers and learners while they read sentences including verb sub-categorization violations. A P600 effect to verb sub-categorization violations was observed in native speakers, while an N400 effect to verb categorization violations was observed in L2 learners. These findings provide electrophysiological evidence for different strategies used by native speakers and L2 learners in sentence processing, and shallower syntactic ability of L2 learners may explain such neural difference.