Dr. Holger Hopp is Professor of English Linguistics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig (Germany). In his research, he investigates child and adult L2/3 acquisition and processing as well as heritage language acquisition and attrition. He uses several psycholinguistic methods to determine the directionality, scope and degree of cross-linguistic influence in bi- and multilingual speakers of different ages.
Dr. Hopp also conducts research on the implementation of psycholinguistically-based teaching methods in the EFL classroom. He is an Associate Editor for the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism and an Editorial Board Member for Second Language Research. His work has appeared in in numerous books and journals, including Studies Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Language Testing, among others.
Plenary title: Processing to learn: Prediction error and implicit learning in L2 sentence processing
Plenary abstract: In this plenary, I will consider the relationship between sentence processing and learning in adult L2 acquisition. I will review a set of recent sentence processing and priming studies that expose adult L2 learners to input that systematically induces prediction error to make learners process L2 morphosyntactic detail. These studies test whether and how quickly learners adapt their processing to grammatical patterns experienced in the input. Finding that L2 speakers rapidly adapt their grammatical processing to the target input, I sketch how adaptation in L2 processing can form the basis for implicit learning of L2 morphosyntax. I then discuss the limits of processing-based learning via adaptation by contrasting short-term adaptation and longer-term learning.