ABSTRACT
English-speaking learners of highly inflected languages often have difficulty processing grammatical cues such as noun-adjective agreement and case markings. The present study examines the role that salience plays in processing noun-adjective case agreement in a highly inflected language where word order is flexible and often is not a reliable cue by comparing learner accuracy and fixation times in two eye-tracking tasks. Seventeen beginning learners of Latin completed a low-salience sentence translation task and a high-salience forced choice adjective completion task. Stimulated recall protocols were completed immediately after the eye-tracking tasks. Results indicate that while the high-salience task did not result in more accurate performance or in more focused attention on nouns in terms of total dwell time, learners indicated their awareness of the need to process noun-adjective agreement in the stimulated recall protocols, even if they were unable to do so accurately.
