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GAPS IN SECOND LANGUAGE SENTENCE PROCESSING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2005

Theodore Marinis ,
Leah Roberts ,
Claudia Felser  and
Harald Clahsen
Theodore Marinis
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Leah Roberts
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Claudia Felser
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Harald Clahsen
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Abstract

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance wh-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.Theodore Marinis is now working at the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and Leah Roberts is at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. The research reported here was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00 213B to H. Clahsen, C. Felser, and R. Hawkins), which is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Bob Borsley, Roger Hawkins, Andrew Radford, the audiences at EUROSLA 12, the 24th Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft Meeting, the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, EUROSLA 13, three anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Ritta Husted and Michaela Wenzlaff for helping with the data collection. We also wish to thank Ted Gibson and Tessa Warren for making their prepublication manuscript available to us.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 53 - 78
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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