Monolingual Turkish speakers, highly proficient Turkish speakers of English as a second language (L2), and native English speakers participated in online self-paced reading tasks and offline pen-and-paper questionnaires testing the processing of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. Experimental stimuli in the online task consisted of temporarily and globally ambiguous sentences. Temporarily ambiguous sentences were disambiguated using animacy information carried by the NPs in the complex genitive NP. The offline task consisted of globally ambiguous sentences. The results of the online and offline tasks showed that both first language (L1) groups preferred to attach the RC to the low noun phrase (NP), both with animate and inanimate antecedents. Results for the L2 group, however, differed in the online and offline tasks. In the online task, they preferred to attach the RC high with animate antecedents, but showed a tendency to attach it low with inanimate antecedents. In the offline task, on the other hand, they showed a high attachment preference throughout. Results are discussed in relation to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis of Clahsen and Felser (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c).
Recent proposals have suggested that second language learners, unlike native speakers, are ‘shallow processors’ in that they do not make use of abstract syntactic knowledge in parsing, relying instead on lexical semantic knowledge and pragmatic notions such as plausibility (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a,b). The present study tested whether Najdi Arabic learners of English process whdependencies incrementally and whether they use knowledge of syntactic constraints in the processing of wh-movement. A group of advanced L2 learners (n = 40) as well as a control group of English native speakers (n = 40) participated in a self-paced reading study, which was based on Stowe (1986). The results of two experiments suggest that non-native processing is, like native processing, incremental and guided by syntactic constraints.
Using the eye-movement monitoring technique, the present study examined whether wh-dependency formation is sensitive to island constraints in second language (L2) sentence comprehension, and whether the presence of an intervening relative clause island has any effects on learners’ ability to ultimately resolve long wh-dependencies. Participants included proficient learners of L2 English from typologically different language backgrounds (German, Chinese), as well as a group of native English-speaking controls. Our results indicate that both the learners and the native speakers were sensitive to relative clause islands during processing, irrespective of typological differences between the learners’ L1s, but that the learners had more difficulty than native speakers linking distant wh-fillers to their lexical subcategorizers during processing. We provide a unified processing-based account for our findings.
This study investigates the effects of linear distance and working memory on native and advanced L2 Spanish speakers’ on-line sensitivity to violations of grammatical gender. Using eye-tracking, participants were tested on agreement violations on predicative adjectives located one, four, and seven words away from a controller noun. The results revealed that linear distance influenced both groups’ sensitivity to gender anomalies, albeit at different points on the linear distance continuum. Furthermore, each group’s sensitivity to gender violations emerged at different points in the eye-movement record. The reading span analysis revealed that the advanced learners’ sensitivity to gender errors during first-pass reading was moderated by individual differences in working memory. The results are discussed in light of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006b).
Based on the feature assembly hypothesis (e.g. Lardiere, 2009), and assuming a universal parser, early stages of second language (L2) acquisition are investigated in this paper. Using a methodology that combines reading time and acceptability judgment data, it is argued that L2 learners’ processing relies on a universal parser that allows the selection of uninterpretable features (even those that are not selected in the learners’ first language, such as uGender) based on a universal store. The data also suggest that these features are (re-)assembled, as shown by the asymmetries in the reading time data, which are taken to reflect different computational costs associated with different computations (i.e. feature checking and feature underspecification).
This study used self-paced reading to examine the processing of Japanese ditransitive scrambling by both native speakers and by second language (L2) learners of Japanese. Because Japanese places the verb at the end of the clause, the impact of verb-based expectations should be less than it is in English (Trueswell, Tanenhaus & Kello, 1993). Instead of the verb-driven processing, Japanese processing relies on case markers, and decisions of structure-building are made locally without any delay (e.g., Miyamoto, 2002). If learners are able to utilize the information encoded by case markers, there should not be any extra processing load involved in scrambled sentences. Fifteen native speakers, 16 first language (L1) Korean intermediate-level learners, and 16 L1 English intermediate-level learners participated in the study. The conditions included canonical order, accusative scramble order, dative scramble order and dative-accusative scramble order. The results demonstrated that there are no significant differences in reading times among word-order types. These findings indicate that (1) Japanese native speakers make use of case-marked arguments as reliable cues for incremental processing, and (2) L2 learners can acquire this processing strategy at native-like levels, regardless of their L1 backgrounds.
This self-paced reading study provides evidence of second language (L2) learners’ ability to perform syntactic gap processing while reading sentences with scrambling in Japanese. Due to the verb-finality of Japanese, syntactic gap processing occurs before the verb’s argument structure information becomes available. The two scrambling conditions included in the study were constructed by dislocating the direct object of a double object construction either a short distance (short scrambling) or farther away (long scrambling) from its canonical pre-verbal position. Both conditions involve syntactic gap processing at the pre-verbal position; however, there is greater difficulty narrowing syntactic predictions at the pre-verbal position in the long than in the short scrambling condition (Nakatani & Gibson, 2008). The study included advanced Korean and Chinese learners and native speakers of Japanese (24 participants per group). The Korean learners showed a reading slowdown at the pre-verbal gap-implicating region in the short scrambling condition but not in the long scrambling condition as the latter apparently overtaxed their cognitive resources. The Chinese learners exhibited no evidence of syntactic gap processing in either scrambling condition. The article proposes a unified account under Simpler Syntax (Culicover & Jackendoff, 2005) of how learners process short- and long-distance scrambling. The account allows for the view that under a high computational demand, learners’ gap processing may result in structurally underspecified but nevertheless legitimate representation of an input string, which is accomplished by making adjustments in the syntax–semantics interface rules and without overreliance on semantic–pragmatic information.
This self-paced reading study explored how English and Dutch L2 learners of German process subject-object ambiguities in German and whether the location of the lexical verb influences on-line processing among L2 learners. Reading time results at the disambiguating region revealed a subject-first preference, regardless of the location of the lexical verb, for all three groups. This highlights the potential for native-like L2 processing. At the same time, however, differences emerged in reading times between the two L2 learner groups on later segments, suggesting that the L1 can influence L2 processing, even among advanced learners.
In this paper we examine parallel developments in the input processing and production of grammatical form among intermediate and advanced level second language learners. To do so, we analyze the results gathered from two experiments on the same participants using object pronouns in Spanish as the target structure. Object pronouns in Spanish include information on case, person and number, but vary on gender marking. Although they occur in several word order patterns, we investigate only OV, that is, the preverbal placement of the pronoun with a simple finite verb. The data consist of a study in which learners processed subject/object relations. The sentence set contained 36 target sentences with 4 examples of each of the following pronouns: first person singular and plural, third person singular and plural, second person singular, dative and accusative uses, and masculine and feminine third person accusative case forms. The sentences were constructed such that the target sentence was the second of two and was of the word order pattern OVS. These data are analysed for correctly identifying who performed the action of the verb, that is, for correct OVS processing. The production data consisted of an oral retelling of a silent film that had been designed specifically to elicit object pronouns. The production data contain all of the forms used in the processing data set except second person singular. These data were analysed for accurate production of form and accurate placement of the pronoun in OV contexts. Our results suggest that processing, production and placement develop in parallel ways, not independently. First, as accurate OVS processing increases so does accurate production and placement in OV contexts. Second, the same morphological factors that affect processing also affect production and placement. Third, both processing, production and placement of first person pronouns is more accurate than that of third person pronouns. Fourth, homophonous forms are more difficult to process, produce and place accurately than are non-homophonous forms. We argue that accurate placement, i.e. the syntax of object pronouns, may be the trigger to developing accurate forms. Learners first fully acquire OV placement while still showing morphological variability in production and processing.
French is a language that poses particular difficulties for the second language (L2) learner in the processing of continuous speech. The phonological processes of liaison and enchainement (resyllabification), can render syllable and word boundaries ambiguous (e.g. un air ‘a melody’ and un nerf ‘a nerve’, both [oe˜ne˜]). Some research has suggested that speakers of French give listeners acoustic cues to word boundaries by varying the duration of liaison and initial consonants and that access to mental representations in the lexicon is facilitated by these cues (e.g. Spinelli, McQueen & Cutler, 2003); however no study to date has directly demonstrated that durational differences are exploited in the online segmentation of speech. One way to directly test the exploitation of duration as a parsing cue by both native and non-native speakers is to manipulate and exaggerate this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors constant. To this end, the current study employed ambiguous French phrases in which the pivotal consonants (i.e. the /n/ in un air/nerf) had been instrumentally shortened and lengthened while the rest of the phrase remained unaltered. Eighteen native speakers of French and 18 advanced late learners of L2 French were tested on an AX discrimination task and a forced-choice identification task employing these manipulated stimuli. The results suggest that duration alone can indeed modulate the lexical interpretation of sequences rendered ambiguous by liaison in spoken French. In addition, although a good deal of variance was observed in both participant groups, five out of 18 non-native participants scored at or above the native mean on both perceptual tasks. These results are particularly interesting in that they suggest that not only can advanced L2 learners develop native-like sensitivity to non-contrastive phonological variation in a L2, but that these learners can exploit this information in L2 speech processing.
Translation ambiguity occurs when a word in one language can be translated in more than one way into another language. This cross-language phenomenon comes from several sources of within-language ambiguity including lexical ambiguity, polysemy, and near-synonymy. We review the existing research on translation ambiguity, including its consequences for vocabulary learning, for lexical processing (e.g., translation performance), and for meaning representation. When possible, we discuss how the impact of translation ambiguity is affected by or interacts with the source of the ambiguity (i.e., near-synonymy vs. lexical ambiguity) and L2 proficiency level.
This paper examines bilingual speech production and constitutes part of an investigation designed to address two separate but interconnected questions. First, do different aspects of prosody relate differently to different syntactic categories? Second, do syntax-prosody correspondences differ between the two languages of a bilingual, and is this modulated by language history? Participants were native speakers of Spanish who were also early acquirers of English, exposed to the language from birth or from between 4 and 6 years of age. They read aloud translation-equivalent passages in English and Spanish. Acoustic analyses of the recorded speech examined phrasing (as indexed in pause durations between words) at key syntactic boundaries throughout the passage. The data demonstrate that early acquirers of English have similar phrasing preferences in both English and Spanish, based on syntactic boundaries. However, reading in Spanish is more disfluent, particularly for participants with less formal exposure to the language.
In this ERP study, native speakers and high- and low-proficiency L2 speakers of French were visually presented with instantiations of informational focus and contrastive focus. 14-channel electroencephalograms were recorded, and mean amplitude was calculated for windows 200–400 ms and 500–700 ms post-target word. For the processing of contrastive focus, native speakers showed a widespread increase in negativity compared to the processing of informational focus. High-proficiency L2 subjects also showed signs of increased negativity; low-proficiency L2 subjects did not. These results suggest the possibility of near-nativelike processing for high-proficiency L2 learners, but not for low-proficiency L2 learners; this finding is consistent with other recent ERP studies of L2 processing (e.g. Osterhout et al., 2006).
Monolingual Turkish speakers, highly proficient Turkish speakers of English as a second language (L2), and native English speakers participated in online self-paced reading tasks and offline pen-and-paper questionnaires testing the processing of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. Experimental stimuli in the online task consisted of temporarily and globally ambiguous sentences. Temporarily ambiguous sentences were disambiguated using animacy information carried by the NPs in the complex genitive NP. The offline task consisted of globally ambiguous sentences. The results of the online and offline tasks showed that both first language (L1) groups preferred to attach the RC to the low noun phrase (NP), both with animate and inanimate antecedents. Results for the L2 group, however, differed in the online and offline tasks. In the online task, they preferred to attach the RC high with animate antecedents, but showed a tendency to attach it low with inanimate antecedents. In the offline task, on the other hand, they showed a high attachment preference throughout. Results are discussed in relation to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis of Clahsen and Felser (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c).
Recent proposals have suggested that second language learners, unlike native speakers, are ‘shallow processors’ in that they do not make use of abstract syntactic knowledge in parsing, relying instead on lexical semantic knowledge and pragmatic notions such as plausibility (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a,b). The present study tested whether Najdi Arabic learners of English process whdependencies incrementally and whether they use knowledge of syntactic constraints in the processing of wh-movement. A group of advanced L2 learners (n = 40) as well as a control group of English native speakers (n = 40) participated in a self-paced reading study, which was based on Stowe (1986). The results of two experiments suggest that non-native processing is, like native processing, incremental and guided by syntactic constraints.
Using the eye-movement monitoring technique, the present study examined whether wh-dependency formation is sensitive to island constraints in second language (L2) sentence comprehension, and whether the presence of an intervening relative clause island has any effects on learners’ ability to ultimately resolve long wh-dependencies. Participants included proficient learners of L2 English from typologically different language backgrounds (German, Chinese), as well as a group of native English-speaking controls. Our results indicate that both the learners and the native speakers were sensitive to relative clause islands during processing, irrespective of typological differences between the learners’ L1s, but that the learners had more difficulty than native speakers linking distant wh-fillers to their lexical subcategorizers during processing. We provide a unified processing-based account for our findings.
This study investigates the effects of linear distance and working memory on native and advanced L2 Spanish speakers’ on-line sensitivity to violations of grammatical gender. Using eye-tracking, participants were tested on agreement violations on predicative adjectives located one, four, and seven words away from a controller noun. The results revealed that linear distance influenced both groups’ sensitivity to gender anomalies, albeit at different points on the linear distance continuum. Furthermore, each group’s sensitivity to gender violations emerged at different points in the eye-movement record. The reading span analysis revealed that the advanced learners’ sensitivity to gender errors during first-pass reading was moderated by individual differences in working memory. The results are discussed in light of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006b).
Based on the feature assembly hypothesis (e.g. Lardiere, 2009), and assuming a universal parser, early stages of second language (L2) acquisition are investigated in this paper. Using a methodology that combines reading time and acceptability judgment data, it is argued that L2 learners’ processing relies on a universal parser that allows the selection of uninterpretable features (even those that are not selected in the learners’ first language, such as uGender) based on a universal store. The data also suggest that these features are (re-)assembled, as shown by the asymmetries in the reading time data, which are taken to reflect different computational costs associated with different computations (i.e. feature checking and feature underspecification).
This study used self-paced reading to examine the processing of Japanese ditransitive scrambling by both native speakers and by second language (L2) learners of Japanese. Because Japanese places the verb at the end of the clause, the impact of verb-based expectations should be less than it is in English (Trueswell, Tanenhaus & Kello, 1993). Instead of the verb-driven processing, Japanese processing relies on case markers, and decisions of structure-building are made locally without any delay (e.g., Miyamoto, 2002). If learners are able to utilize the information encoded by case markers, there should not be any extra processing load involved in scrambled sentences. Fifteen native speakers, 16 first language (L1) Korean intermediate-level learners, and 16 L1 English intermediate-level learners participated in the study. The conditions included canonical order, accusative scramble order, dative scramble order and dative-accusative scramble order. The results demonstrated that there are no significant differences in reading times among word-order types. These findings indicate that (1) Japanese native speakers make use of case-marked arguments as reliable cues for incremental processing, and (2) L2 learners can acquire this processing strategy at native-like levels, regardless of their L1 backgrounds.
This self-paced reading study provides evidence of second language (L2) learners’ ability to perform syntactic gap processing while reading sentences with scrambling in Japanese. Due to the verb-finality of Japanese, syntactic gap processing occurs before the verb’s argument structure information becomes available. The two scrambling conditions included in the study were constructed by dislocating the direct object of a double object construction either a short distance (short scrambling) or farther away (long scrambling) from its canonical pre-verbal position. Both conditions involve syntactic gap processing at the pre-verbal position; however, there is greater difficulty narrowing syntactic predictions at the pre-verbal position in the long than in the short scrambling condition (Nakatani & Gibson, 2008). The study included advanced Korean and Chinese learners and native speakers of Japanese (24 participants per group). The Korean learners showed a reading slowdown at the pre-verbal gap-implicating region in the short scrambling condition but not in the long scrambling condition as the latter apparently overtaxed their cognitive resources. The Chinese learners exhibited no evidence of syntactic gap processing in either scrambling condition. The article proposes a unified account under Simpler Syntax (Culicover & Jackendoff, 2005) of how learners process short- and long-distance scrambling. The account allows for the view that under a high computational demand, learners’ gap processing may result in structurally underspecified but nevertheless legitimate representation of an input string, which is accomplished by making adjustments in the syntax–semantics interface rules and without overreliance on semantic–pragmatic information.
This self-paced reading study explored how English and Dutch L2 learners of German process subject-object ambiguities in German and whether the location of the lexical verb influences on-line processing among L2 learners. Reading time results at the disambiguating region revealed a subject-first preference, regardless of the location of the lexical verb, for all three groups. This highlights the potential for native-like L2 processing. At the same time, however, differences emerged in reading times between the two L2 learner groups on later segments, suggesting that the L1 can influence L2 processing, even among advanced learners.
In this paper we examine parallel developments in the input processing and production of grammatical form among intermediate and advanced level second language learners. To do so, we analyze the results gathered from two experiments on the same participants using object pronouns in Spanish as the target structure. Object pronouns in Spanish include information on case, person and number, but vary on gender marking. Although they occur in several word order patterns, we investigate only OV, that is, the preverbal placement of the pronoun with a simple finite verb. The data consist of a study in which learners processed subject/object relations. The sentence set contained 36 target sentences with 4 examples of each of the following pronouns: first person singular and plural, third person singular and plural, second person singular, dative and accusative uses, and masculine and feminine third person accusative case forms. The sentences were constructed such that the target sentence was the second of two and was of the word order pattern OVS. These data are analysed for correctly identifying who performed the action of the verb, that is, for correct OVS processing. The production data consisted of an oral retelling of a silent film that had been designed specifically to elicit object pronouns. The production data contain all of the forms used in the processing data set except second person singular. These data were analysed for accurate production of form and accurate placement of the pronoun in OV contexts. Our results suggest that processing, production and placement develop in parallel ways, not independently. First, as accurate OVS processing increases so does accurate production and placement in OV contexts. Second, the same morphological factors that affect processing also affect production and placement. Third, both processing, production and placement of first person pronouns is more accurate than that of third person pronouns. Fourth, homophonous forms are more difficult to process, produce and place accurately than are non-homophonous forms. We argue that accurate placement, i.e. the syntax of object pronouns, may be the trigger to developing accurate forms. Learners first fully acquire OV placement while still showing morphological variability in production and processing.
French is a language that poses particular difficulties for the second language (L2) learner in the processing of continuous speech. The phonological processes of liaison and enchainement (resyllabification), can render syllable and word boundaries ambiguous (e.g. un air ‘a melody’ and un nerf ‘a nerve’, both [oe˜ne˜]). Some research has suggested that speakers of French give listeners acoustic cues to word boundaries by varying the duration of liaison and initial consonants and that access to mental representations in the lexicon is facilitated by these cues (e.g. Spinelli, McQueen & Cutler, 2003); however no study to date has directly demonstrated that durational differences are exploited in the online segmentation of speech. One way to directly test the exploitation of duration as a parsing cue by both native and non-native speakers is to manipulate and exaggerate this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors constant. To this end, the current study employed ambiguous French phrases in which the pivotal consonants (i.e. the /n/ in un air/nerf) had been instrumentally shortened and lengthened while the rest of the phrase remained unaltered. Eighteen native speakers of French and 18 advanced late learners of L2 French were tested on an AX discrimination task and a forced-choice identification task employing these manipulated stimuli. The results suggest that duration alone can indeed modulate the lexical interpretation of sequences rendered ambiguous by liaison in spoken French. In addition, although a good deal of variance was observed in both participant groups, five out of 18 non-native participants scored at or above the native mean on both perceptual tasks. These results are particularly interesting in that they suggest that not only can advanced L2 learners develop native-like sensitivity to non-contrastive phonological variation in a L2, but that these learners can exploit this information in L2 speech processing.
Translation ambiguity occurs when a word in one language can be translated in more than one way into another language. This cross-language phenomenon comes from several sources of within-language ambiguity including lexical ambiguity, polysemy, and near-synonymy. We review the existing research on translation ambiguity, including its consequences for vocabulary learning, for lexical processing (e.g., translation performance), and for meaning representation. When possible, we discuss how the impact of translation ambiguity is affected by or interacts with the source of the ambiguity (i.e., near-synonymy vs. lexical ambiguity) and L2 proficiency level.
This paper examines bilingual speech production and constitutes part of an investigation designed to address two separate but interconnected questions. First, do different aspects of prosody relate differently to different syntactic categories? Second, do syntax-prosody correspondences differ between the two languages of a bilingual, and is this modulated by language history? Participants were native speakers of Spanish who were also early acquirers of English, exposed to the language from birth or from between 4 and 6 years of age. They read aloud translation-equivalent passages in English and Spanish. Acoustic analyses of the recorded speech examined phrasing (as indexed in pause durations between words) at key syntactic boundaries throughout the passage. The data demonstrate that early acquirers of English have similar phrasing preferences in both English and Spanish, based on syntactic boundaries. However, reading in Spanish is more disfluent, particularly for participants with less formal exposure to the language.
In this ERP study, native speakers and high- and low-proficiency L2 speakers of French were visually presented with instantiations of informational focus and contrastive focus. 14-channel electroencephalograms were recorded, and mean amplitude was calculated for windows 200–400 ms and 500–700 ms post-target word. For the processing of contrastive focus, native speakers showed a widespread increase in negativity compared to the processing of informational focus. High-proficiency L2 subjects also showed signs of increased negativity; low-proficiency L2 subjects did not. These results suggest the possibility of near-nativelike processing for high-proficiency L2 learners, but not for low-proficiency L2 learners; this finding is consistent with other recent ERP studies of L2 processing (e.g. Osterhout et al., 2006).