The 2025 SLATE Research Symposium  will be held on May 8, 2025 (Reading Day), College of Education, Room 22

The Symposium will run from 10am to 2pm, including a poster session for student research (11:30-1:00) and boxed lunches for all attendees.

 

***Deadline for Poster Review is APRIL 15! PLEASE send Kiel Christianson (kiel@illinois.edu) your abstracts.***

 

Speakers:

Our invited speaker this year is Dr. Scott Jarvis, Professor, University of Northern Arizona and Editor-in-Chief of Language Learning.

TITLE: What is lexical diversity and why is it important to SLA?

ABSTRACT: Diversity is a central element of complex systems like language (Page, 2011). The diversity of words in a speech or writing sample reflects not only the nature and quality of the sample but also the background, language ability, and mental state of its creator. Lexical diversity involves more than the ratio of word types to word tokens; it is also a matter of which words are present, how they are distributed throughout the text, how they interact, what their discursive functions are, how unique (i.e., non-redundant) they are, and what their contribution is to the conceptual clarity and vividness of the text. The purposes of this talk are to describe what lexical diversity is, how to measure it, and why it is important to the field of second language acquisition. I will also present empirical evidence that suggests that competent speakers of a language share an intuitive sense of an optimal level of lexical diversity, and that lexical diversity in natural language is distinguishable from lexical diversity in AI-generated texts. While doing so, I will demonstrate how these insights can inform SLA research, language assessment, and L2 pedagogy.

Headshot of Dr. Scott Jarvis
Dr. Scott Jarvis

 

Our Illinois speaker this year will be Dr. Lin Chen, Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology.

TITLE: Syntactic Processing in Skilled L2 Reading: Native-like or Not Quite? 

Abstract: A longstanding debate in second language (L2) research concerns whether skilled L2 readers can develop native-like syntactic processing. Our prior work (Chen et al., 2025) found that syntactic information plays a crucial role in skilled L1 reading, but different syntactic processes unfold over distinct time courses when reading authentic texts. Specifically, syntactic structure building occurs early, whereas syntactically supported meaning integration emerges later. These processes are indicated by two distinct measures: syntactic surprisal (the conditional probability of a word’s part-of-speech given preceding syntactic context) and phrase structure closure (the number of phrase structures closed by a word). This study examines whether skilled L2 readers show a similar time course for these syntactic processes as L1 readers. We recruited three groups of skilled college-level L2 English readers (Spanish-English, Korean-English, and Chinese-English; ~30 participants per group) and recorded EEG while participants read 63 two-sentence texts from The New York Times. All L2 groups showed phrase structure closure effects on the N400, mirroring patterns observed in L1 readers and highlighting the role of syntactic structure in supporting semantic processing. However, unlike L1 readers, who typically show syntactic surprisal effects on an early negativity component, all L2 groups exhibited this effect later on the N400, suggesting delayed syntactic structure building. Notably, this time course was moderated by language proficiency, as measured by the Nelson-Denny Tests. Higher-proficiency L2 readers demonstrated earlier surprisal effects, more closely resembling those of L1 readers, suggesting that proficiency influences the timing of syntactic structure building. These findings suggest that skilled L2 readers generally engage in similar syntactic processes as L1 readers, but their language proficiency continues to shape when and how efficiently these processes unfold.