The present study investigated the second language processing of grammatical mood in Spanish. Eye-movement data from a group of advanced proficiency second language users revealed nativelike processing with irregular verb stimuli but not with regular verb stimuli. A comparison group of native speakers showed the expected effect with both types of stimuli, but these were slightly more robust with irregular verbs than with regular verbs. We propose that the role of verb form regularity was due to the greater visual salience of Spanish subjunctive forms with irregular verbs versus regular verbs and possibly also due to less efficient processing of rule-based regular inflectional morphology versus whole irregular word forms. In any case, the results suggest that what appeared to be difficulty with sentence processing could be traced back to word-level processes, which appeared to be the primary area of difficulty. This outcome seems to go against theories that suggest that L2 sentence processing is shallow.

本研究调查了西班牙语语法语气的第二语言处理。来自一组精通第二语言的高级用户的眼球运动数据显示，处理不规则动词刺激而不是规则动词刺激的母语处理。一组以母语为母语的人显示了两种刺激的预期效果，但不规则动词的效果比规则动词的效果稍强。我们认为，动词形式规律性的作用是由于西班牙语虚拟语气形式与不规则动词相比规则动词具有更大的视觉显着性，也可能是由于基于规则的规则屈折形态与整个不规则词形式的处理效率较低。任何状况之下，结果表明，句子处理的困难可以追溯到单词级处理，这似乎是主要的困难领域。这一结果似乎与表明二语句子加工浅薄的理论相悖。