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The on-line processing of binding principles in second language acquisition: Evidence from eye tracking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2014

EUNAH KIM ,
SILVINA MONTRUL  and
JAMES YOON
EUNAH KIM
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
SILVINA MONTRUL*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
JAMES YOON
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Silvina Montrul, Departments of Linguistics and of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, MC-176, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail: montrul@illinois.edu
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Abstract

This study examined how adult L2 learners make use of grammatical and extragrammatical information to interpret reflexives and pronouns. Forty adult English native speakers and 32 intermediate–advanced Korean L2 learners participated in a visual world paradigm eye-tracking experiment. We investigated the interpretation of reflexives (himself) and pronouns (him) in contexts where there is a potential coargument antecedent and in the context of picture noun phrases (a picture of him/himself), where the distribution of reflexives and pronouns can overlap. The results indicated that the learners interpreted reflexives in a nativelike fashion in both contexts, whereas they interpreted pronouns differently from native speakers, even when learners had advanced English proficiency. Adopting the binding theory as developed in the reflexivity/primitives of binding framework (Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; Reuland, 2001, 2011), we interpret these results to mean that while adult L2 learners are able to apply syntactic binding principles to assign an interpretation to anaphoric expressions, they have difficulty in integrating syntactic information with contextual and discourse information.

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Articles
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Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 36 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1317 - 1374
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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