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FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES AND ISLAND CONSTRAINTS IN SECOND-LANGUAGE SENTENCE PROCESSING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

Akira Omaki  and
Barbara Schulz
Akira Omaki*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
Barbara Schulz
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
*
*Address correspondence to: Akira Omaki, Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Room 237 Krieger Hall, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218; e-mail: omaki@cogsci.jhu.edu.
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Abstract

Second-language (L2) sentence processing may differ from processing in a native language in a variety of ways, and it has been argued that one major difference is that L2 learners can only construct shallow representations that lack structural details (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006). The present study challenges this hypothesis by comparing the extent to which advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English learners and English native speakers make use of the relative clause island constraint in constructing filler-gap dependencies. In offline acceptability judgment and online self-paced reading experiments that used stimuli adapted from Traxler and Pickering (1996), both the L2 group and the native-speaker control group demonstrated clear evidence for application of the relative clause island constraint. These findings suggest that advanced L2 learners not only build abstract structural representations but also rapidly constrain the active search for a gap location. These results cast doubt on the proposal that L2 learners are unable to build structural representations with grammatical precision.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 563 - 588
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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