ABSTRACT
Inflected languages mark semantic information with lexical cues (e.g., explicit subjects) and morphological cues (e.g., suffixes) (Evans, 2003), but adult second language (L2) learners have difficulty processing the latter. This difficulty is exacerbated in sentences containing both cues encoding the same meaning (Ellis, 2006), in learners with low proficiency levels (Hopp, 2010) or low working memory (WM) span (Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010), and in native speakers of a morphologically poor or null language (Sagarra & Ellis, 2013). To address this problem, we investigate whether study abroad SA and high WM span can facilitate the processing of inflectional morphemes in low-proficiency adult learners whose first language (L1) is morphologically poor.
