Second Language Learners and Speech Act Comprehension

Recognizing the specific speech act ( Searle, 1969 ) that a speaker performs with an utterance is a fundamental feature of pragmatic competence. Past research has demonstrated that native speakers of English automatically recognize speech acts when they comprehend utterances ( Holtgraves & Ashley, 2001 ). The present research examined whether this occurs for participants learning English as a second language. Participants read conversational utterances and then performed a lexical decision task (decide whether a target string of letters is a word). Consistent with past research, native speakers performed this task more quickly when the target string was the speech act associated with the preceding utterance. In contrast, nonnative speakers did not demonstrate this effect, suggesting that speech act activation is not an automatic component of comprehension for people acquiring a second language.