The Shallow Structure Hypothesis

1. Non-native speakers never acquire a deep knowledge of grammatical principles in L2

2. They rely instead on meaning-driven (thematic) processing strategies.

ELAN: Early Left anterior negativity

 N400 & P600

Bilingual syntactic processing 

1. evidence for shared syntactic representations

2. processing studies show initial transfer of L1 processing strategies, and a shift towards L2 strategies, at least in some cases

3. Native-like brain responses to grammatical violations can be obtained in adult learners. (in some studies)

4. there is some evidence for an early lexically or semantically driven stage of processing.

5. Still a question mark over whether L2 syntactic knowledge can never be truly native-like. It seems to depend on similarity to L1 and proficiency (Foucard & French-mestre, 2011; van Hell, & Tokowicz, 2010)

How the brain adapts to learning a L2 (brain plasticity)