Overview

Though psycholinguists have made significant progress in understanding how first-language (L1) speakers produce sentences in speech, little is known about second-language (L2) sentence production processing (Heredia, 2003) and its development. This is partly because L2 research has focused upon the development of L2 knowledge, rather than real-time processing of that knowledge in performance (e.g. speaking). Paradoxically, however, most methods commonly adopted to study L2 knowledge often rely upon performance data (e.g. written/spoken). Analysis of such data to uncover L2 competence could benefit substantially from further research into L2 sentence processing.

Currently, research on L2 processing focuses almost exclusively on Indo-European languages, and few studies on L2 Japanese sentence production incorporate L1 psycholinguistic models. To situate L2 Japanese studies in a wider context, I will first review previous L2 sentence production research: L2 studies incorporating L1 sentence production models and L2 speech error studies referring to L1 speech error research. I will then briefly review studies on L1 Japanese speech errors involving case particles before discussing L2 Japanese production studies involving case particles.

Approaches in early L2 production research

Much early L2 production research primarily investigated temporal variables such as speaking rate and pause length (e.g. Dechert, Möhle & Raupach, 1984). These studies provided important observations about factors including automatization, but were primarily descriptive, rather than hypothesis-testing (e.g. Crookes, 1991).