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Part of
Current Perspectives on Generative SLA - Processing, Influence, and Interfaces: Selected proceedings of the 16th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference
Edited by Marta Velnić, Anne Dahl and Kjersti Faldet Listhaug
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 70] 2024
► pp. 197–219

Chapter 8
Offline L2-English relative clause attachment preferences

The effects of L1-Japanese and L2 proficiency

| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
This paper adds to the debate on second language (L2) relative clause (RC) attachment preferences by investigating offline L2-English preferences by first-language (L1) speakers of Japanese, which has strong head-finality and free word order (Ito et al., 2021; Kamide & Mitchell, 1998; Yamada et al., 2017). A forced-choice task tested L1-English and L1-Japanese/L2-English speakers with RCs that were pragmatically disambiguated to bias high or low attachment or had neutral bias. The L2 group’s high-attachment preference across all conditions compared to L1-English speakers was statistically significant. No L2 proficiency no effects were found. As English and Japanese are predicted to be influenced by the competing parsing principles of Recency and Predicate Proximity, respectively, these results suggest that attachment preferences are transferrable to the L2.
Keywords: relative clauses, attachment bias, recency, predicate proximity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1RC attachment preferences
    • 2.2RC attachment preferences in Japanese
    • 2.3Prior studies on L1-Japanese L2-English RC attachment
    • 2.4L2 proficiency and L2 RC attachment
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Materials
      • 4.1.1Norming items
      • 4.1.2Experimental items
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Procedure
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1NS vs. L2
    • 5.2L2 proficiency analysis
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 17 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.70.08ati
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