The present study uses event-related potentials to investigate how crosslinguistic (dis)similarities modulate anticipatory processing in the second language (L2). Participants read predictive stories in English that made a genitive construction consisting of a third-person singular possessive pronoun and a kinship noun (e.g., his mother) likely in an upcoming continuation. The possessive pronoun's form depended on the antecedent's natural gender, which had been previously established in the stories. The continuation included either the expected genitive construction or an unexpected one with a possessive pronoun of the opposite gender. We manipulated crosslinguistic (dis)similarity by comparing advanced English learners with either Swedish or Spanish as their L1. While Swedish has equivalent possessive pronouns that mark the antecedent's natural gender (i.e., hans/hennes “his/her”), Spanish does not. In fact, Spanish possessive pronouns mark the syntactic features (number, gender) of the possessed noun (e.g., nosotros queremos a nuestra madre “we-_MASC love our-_FEM mother-_FEM). Twenty-four native speakers of English elicited an N400 effect for prenominal possessives that were unexpected based on the possessor noun's natural gender, consistent with the possibility that they activated the pronoun's form or its semantic features (natural gender). Thirty-two Swedish-speaking learners yielded a qualitatively and quantitatively native-like N400 for unexpected prenominal possessives. In contrast, twenty-five Spanish-speaking learners showed a P600 effect for unexpected possessives, consistent with the possibility that they experienced difficulty integrating a pronoun that mismatched the expected gender. Results suggest that differences with respect to the features encoded in the activated representation result in different predictive mechanisms among adult L2 learners.

本研究利用事件相关的潜力来研究跨语言（异）相似性如何调节第二语言（L2）中的预期处理。参与者阅读英语的预言故事，这些预言故事构成了由第三人称单数所有格代词和亲属名词（例如，他的母亲）组成的属格结构），可能会在即将到来的延续中使用。所有格代词的形式取决于先前故事中已确立的先例的自然性别。接续包括预期的属格结构或具有异性所有格代词的意想不到的属格结构。我们通过比较高级英语学习者与瑞典语或西班牙语作为L1来处理跨语言（非）相似性。尽管瑞典语具有等同的所有格代词，以标记该前任的自然性别（即，汉斯/汉纳斯“他/她”），但西班牙语却没有。事实上，西班牙所有格代词标记了所有格名词的句法特征（数量，性别）（例如，nosotros queremos a nuestra madre “我们_MASC爱我们的-_FEM母亲- _FEM）。24位以英语为母语的母语使用者基于持有人名词的自然性别，对出乎意料的代名词所有物引发了N400效应，这与他们激活代词的形式或语义特征（自然性别）的可能性一致。32名讲瑞典语的学习者从定性和定量方面获得了类似N400的本色N400，用于意外的名词性占位格。相比之下，有25个说西班牙语的学习者对意想不到的所有格表现出P600的效果，这与他们在整合与预期性别不匹配的代词时遇到困难的可能性一致。结果表明，在成年L2学习者中，关于在激活表示中编码的特征的差异会导致不同的预测机制。