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Lingering misinterpretation in native and nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from structural priming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2020

Hiroki Fujita Open the ORCID record for Hiroki Fujita [Opens in a new window]  and
Ian Cunnings Open the ORCID record for Ian Cunnings [Opens in a new window]
Hiroki Fujita*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
Ian Cunnings
Affiliation:
University of Reading
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: hiroki.fujita@reading.ac.uk
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Abstract

Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers sometimes misinterpret temporarily ambiguous sentences like “When Mary dressed the baby laughed happily.” Recent studies suggest that the initially assigned misinterpretation (“Mary dressed the baby”) may persist even after disambiguation, and that L2 speakers may have particular difficulty discarding initial misinterpretations. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers are more persistent with misinterpretation compared with L1 speakers during sentence processing, using the structural priming and eye tracking while reading tasks. In the experiment, participants read prime followed by target sentences. Reading times revealed that unambiguous but not ambiguous prime sentences facilitated processing of the globally correct interpretation of ambiguous target sentences. However, this priming effect was only observed when the prime and target sentence shared the same verb. Comprehension accuracy rates were not significantly influenced by priming effects but did provide evidence of lingering misinterpretation. We did not find significant L1/L2 differences in either priming effects or persistence of misinterpretation. Together, these results suggest that initially assigned misinterpretations linger in both L1 and L2 readers during sentence processing and that L1 and L2 comprehension priming is strongly lexically mediated.

Keywords

good-enough processingnonnative processingstructural primingsyntactic ambiguity resolution
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 42 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: Individual Differences in Bilingualism , March 2021 , pp. 475 - 504
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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