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Adult second language acquisition under negligible exposure and no instruction

A self-paced reading study on adjuncts obligatory control

 | Università di Pavia, Italy | University College Dublin, Ireland
 | Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language, Spain
 | Waseda University, Japan
 | Università di Pavia, Italy
 | Waseda University, Japan | Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language, Spain
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University College Dublin.

Published online: 3 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.00053.ras
Abstract
This study investigates whether adult learners of Italian as a second language (L2) acquire Obligatory Control (OC) in non-finite gerundive adjuncts, which is the local relationship between the empty subject PRO in the adjunct and the subject of the main clause. Adjunct OC in Italian is neither frequent in input nor explicitly taught. In a self-paced reading experiment with a sentence similarity-judgment task, 34 participants with various L1s and proficiency levels were tested seven months apart. By the second session, participants were more accurate and faster at identifying the main clause subject as the PRO controller and showed faster reading times at the non-finite form in the target-probe matching condition. We explore whether proficiency, exposure, L1, input distribution, or a combination of factors may explain our results.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Topic, motivation and purpose of the study
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Theoretical motivation
    • 2.2The PRO theorem
    • 2.3Obligatory and non-obligatory control
    • 2.4Adjunct OC and Second Language Acquisition (SLA)
    • 2.5Adjunct OC and L2 proficiency
    • 2.6Adjunct OC and frequency in the input
    • 2.7Adjunct OC and learners’ L1
    • 2.8Classroom instruction
  • 3.Research questions and predictions
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Design
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Stimuli and rationale
    • 4.4Procedure
      • 4.4.1Technique
      • 4.4.2Data preparation and statistical analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Accuracy
    • 5.2Reaction times
    • 5.3Reading times of the first region of Interest (ROI)
    • 5.4Reading times of the region of interest at the end of the sentence (ROI_last)
    • 5.5Reading times of the Probe sentence
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Summary of results
    • 6.2In what sense does knowledge of verb morphology positively impact the results?
    • 6.3Input distribution partly impacts online processing, while the impact of L1 is uncertain
    • 6.4Shortcomings
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Data Availability
  • Notes
  • References
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