Participants

All participants (N = 85) voluntarily took part in the study. They were recruited via PESA44_{, StudiVZ,}45 _{and announcements on the notice boards of the language centres at}

Berlin and Brandenburg universities. Prior to both testing sessions (see below), the participants were asked to fill out an electronic questionnaire to evolve their handedness following the Edinburgh Handedness Design (Oldfield, 1971; samples of the

44 _{PESA—Psychologischer Experimentalserver Adlershof (‘psychological experimental server} Adlershof’)—is a large electronic database established by the psychological department of Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin. Any person may register who agrees to volunteer to take part in psychological and psycholinguistic experiments. One needs to provide personal information including age, status, handedness, and psychological history (pathology) (see also http://macs5.psychologie.hu-

berlin.de/pesa/public/index.php [retrieved on August 20, 2012]). Invitations for experimental

participation may be sent to a choice of more than 5,000 persons, where the choice is accommodated to the conditions that have to be met for the study in question. Registered persons that fit the conditions are invited electronically (by email) to participate, and they may choose to respond to invitation or not. Most (75%) native German speakers (serving as control group) were obtained through this recruitment strategy. The remaining 25% of the recruited native German speakers followed invitations on notice boards. At the time of testing only nine native Polish speakers, who met experimental preconditions, were registered in PESA—three of them followed the invitation and took part in the study.

45 _{StudiVZ is a public electronic database, based on the principle of social networking, where anybody} having access to the Internet may register (see http://www.studivz.net/Default, [retrieved on August 20,

2012]). StudiVZ includes a so-called group sector, where a group relates to a certain community of interest which shares the same affections, hobbies, or backgrounds, etc. One of those groups is called ‘Polnische Studenten in Berlin’ (‘Polish students in Berlin’). Announcements of the experiments were sent

to members of this group via the social networks’ messaging system. About one-third of L2 learners (n=20) were recruited through this kind of electronic means.

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3. Participants, Materials, and Experimental Procedures

questionnaires are given in appendices).46 _{In addition to the handedness information,}

the questionnaire was modified and extended to collect data on the L1 / L2 background

of each participant and included further information about the following: the length of residence (LOR) in Germany, the scale-recorded frequency of German language use in accordance with different settings (viz. at university, at home, in daily life, with friends), and the scale-recorded self-evaluation of their L2 skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The collection of such meta data47 _{may be important for further statistical}

analysis. Since the current study focuses on the potential influences of L2 learners’ AoA and proficiency, there is a need to control for possible further covariates as they may correlate with AoA and / or proficiency. According to LOR, it is reasonable to assume

that L2 learners who have longer resided in a German speaking surrounding are being exposed to more L2 input and hence have reached higher L2 proficiency than those L2 learners who have a much shorter residence time. This may result in a strong correlation between the proficiency level and LOR. Such correlations are undesirable and therefore need to be controlled or at least to be acknowledged with respect to further analysis (see also Flege et al., 1999 for results and discussions on correlations of potential covariates with AoA). Results of the correlation tests between meta data and both AoA and proficiency are reported in Chapter 4.1.

Behavioural and EEG responses of 65 native speakers of Polish with German as their L2 (38 female) and a control group of 20 native German speakers (12 female) were recorded. According to data analysis, the participants were divided into two groups, namely native speaker and L2 learner. At the time of testing, all the participants were residents of Berlin / Brandenburg area and attended a Berlin or Brandenburg

University. They were aged between 20 and 31, right-handed, and had normal vision. The experimental procedure was divided into two sessions. These two sessions did not take place on the same day. The temporal distance ranged between two days (least) and eight days (most). The first session lasted for about 45 minutes and covered the

46 _{Questionnaires for native German speakers and German L2 learners slightly differed. Native speakers} did not have to report on their language acquisition histories and backgrounds.

47 _{The term meta data is my own usage referring to the additional linguistic background information of all} participants, which was collected through the questionnaires (see text above).

50

3. Participants, Materials and Experimental Procedures

introduction of the participants to the EEG-lab. Following that, the participants’ level of proficiency was evaluated by recording a standard German proficiency test —the C- Test. This is a pen and paper test that consists of five cloze tests, chosen from a large variety of the standardized version of German proficiency tests provided by the language centre at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (see appendix 9, see also https://anmeldung.sprachen-zentrum.hu-berlin.de/cgi/ctest2.cgi?testcode=61a4b9a75

bebbb3af41cc3965cdbcd1d [last retrieved on July 03, 2012]. The participants had to finish the C-Test within 25 minutes. Evaluation proceeded by the one cloze-one count principle. Proficiency was assigned following the representative levels of CEFR (see also comments in Chapter 1): 100-81 = C1-C2 (high proficiency), 80-41 = B1-B2 (low proficiency). The lowest test result was 57 (see Chapter 4.1.1 below). Along the lines of CEFR levels B1-B2 are not considered as ‘low’ proficient but as ‘intermediate’. When the participants and the experimenters had no further questions, an appointment for the second session was scheduled. The second session comprised the EEG recording which is described in Chapter 3.2 below.48