SUPERPOSITION OF GRAMMATICAL AND STATISTICAL LEARNING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: AN EYE‐TRACKING STUDY

In this paper, data from an eye‐tracking study on auxiliary selection in L2 Italian are reported. The data suggest that learners of Italian over time and with increasing experience can process the same compound past verbs in two apparently commutable ways within the same experimental session. One way is statistical (centered on the lexical part of the verb, the past participle), and the other is grammatical (centered on the auxiliary). The results also indicate that L2 learners – with increasing proficiency – can alternate statistical and grammatical representations and processing routes for the same phenomenon within the array of a single sentence, as native speakers do.