L2 Knowledge of the Obligatory French Subjunctive: Offline Measures and Eye Tracking Compared

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

See attached document

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We are really grateful to the two reviewers, whose insightful discussion and suggestions have allowed us to improve the submission considerably. In what follows, we address every comment.

 

• 2: “As such, it is thought” à In response to this comment, we have tried to be more explicit about how eye movement data can be more indicative of implicit knowledge.
• 2 “whether L2 judgments” à The comment about L2 judgments being a proxy of L2 representations has been weakened now, and we have acknowledged that there is some debate in the field about whether we should consider offline judgments as a proxy for L2 representations.
• 2-3: Given that the SSH is not an important element in this study, this paragraph has now been removed from the article. We have also made the connection between the aim and the justification for the focus on the subjunctive more explicitly, by referencing the English-French morphosyntactic differences, and how several previous studies suggest a potential role for the L1.
• 5, footnote 5: A paragraph has been added to page 4 acknowledging that several studies suggest that the subjunctive is an example of a variable structure.
• 7: A paragraph has been added acknowledging this additional factor.
• 8: A comment has been added expanding on why there might be an asymmetry between online and offline data.
• 9: A footnote (fn.8) has been added at the bottom of page 9 explaining why additional languages weren’t included in the analysis.
• 11: The sentence structure has been changed to make it clear what was included in the critical region and what wasn’t.
• 18: We have added an acknowledgment that any surprise effect may have been reduced because all 72 items had the same form.
• 18: We have elaborated on what we mean by “processing accurately”
• 19: We have spelt out why these avenues would be interesting.
• 2: We have been more explicit about what we mean by highly taught.
• 2: We have removed the comment about Ayoun (2013) being a rare exception, and instead said that her study indirectly examined L1 influence.
• 6, line 249: typo has been correctly.
• 7: Quality of input has been defined
• 8, RQ2: “L1–L2 differences in” has been moved to the line below.
• 7: The inclusion of an L1 group is introduced now on page 7 before the predictions.
• 9, line 458-459: The sentence has been reworded.
• Table 6 has been relabelled.
• 17, line 723: The typo has now been corrected.

Reviewer 2 Report

See attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We are really grateful to the two reviewers, whose insightful discussion and suggestions have allowed us to improve the submission considerably. In what follows, we address every comment.

 

• Line 64: The verb has been changed to “is present”.
• Line 118: The typo has been corrected
• Line 111: The initialism FRH is now introduced on p.30.
• Line 117: The dot has now been removed from the title
• Line 126: Prediates has been changed to predicates
• Line 125: The example has been changed from réaliser to se rendre compte
• Line 129: The example has been changed from suggérer to demander
• Line 129: The example has been changed from insister to exiger. Note that neither suggérer or insister were used as stimuli in the current experiment.
• 2: A space has been added
• Table 1: A footnote has now been added, defining the notion of sentience.
• Line 288: Would you be able to clarify what you mean by ‘featural à featural’?
• The hypothesis formulated in lines 318-319 are in contradiction with the hypothesis formulated in lines 333-334 because the former refers to L1 speakers, and the latter refers to L2 speakers.
• 9: Method: A reference to Tables 7 and 8 in the appendix is made on line 401 of page 10.
• Lines 371-381: A comment has been added about how results from LexTALE have been shown to correlate highly with other standardised proficiency measures, such as the Oxford QPT, which assess both morphosyntactic and lexical knowledge.
• 10 and 11: the font type has been changed now.
• Line 529: Changed from 5.1 to 5.2
• Results: We did not divide the participants into two different proficiency groups. Figure 4 references L1 speakers of English and L1 speakers of French.
• Line 626: “Turn out attention” has been changed to “turn our attention”
• Line 736: Pronomimal has been changed to pronominal.
• Page 18: A footnote has been added to address the comment that the L1 behaviour could be attributed to the fact that the participants were bilingual.
• Lines 669-676: Several footnotes have been added to address the comments regarding whether British English L2 learners of French establish a relation between the subjunctive in English and French and the role of verb type.
• Line 680: A comment has been added about how we were not interested in comparing L1 and L2 speakers, but rather the difference between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
• Line 698: A reference to the van Osch et al study has been added.
• Line 747: Point 2 has now been added to the summary at the beginning of the paper.
• Table 8: Typo with the participant numbers; this has been corrected.
• We did not divide the L2 participants into two proficiency groups; instead, we treated proficiency as a continuous variable to maximise statistical power. In the methodology section, we present the proficiency scores of the L1 French and L1 English speakers separately.
• A footnote has been added on page 9 regarding the comment about Table 8.