The present study replicates the findings in Robenalt & Goldberg (2015) with a group of native speakers and critically extends the paradigm to non-native speakers. Recent findings in second language acquisition suggest that second language (L2) learners are less able to generate online expectations during language processing, which in turn predicts a reduced ability to differentiate between novel sentences that have a competing alternative and those that do not. We test this prediction and confirm that while L2 speakers display evidence of learning from positive exemplars, they show no evidence of taking competing grammatical alternatives into account, except at the highest quartile of speaking proficiency in which case L2 judgments align with native speakers.