Open AccessBook Chapter
Gaps in Second Language Sentence Processing
TLDR
This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing and to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language.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.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Grammatical Processing in Language Learners.
Harald Clahsen,Claudia Felser +1 more
TL;DR: This paper conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language learners] as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax).
Journal ArticleDOI
How native-like is non-native language processing?
Harald Clahsen,Claudia Felser +1 more
TL;DR: It appears that L2 processing can become native-like in some linguistic subdomains but that L1 and L1 processing differences persist in the domain of complex syntax, even in highly proficient L2 speakers.
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The Effect of Exposure on Syntactic Parsing in Spanish-English Bilinguals.
Paola E. Dussias,Nuria Sagarra +1 more
TL;DR: This paper examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language and found that whereas the Spanish monolingual speakers and the Spanish bilinguals with limited exposure reliably attached the relative clause to the first noun, the Spanish-English bilingual with extensive exposure attached the relation to the second noun.
Journal ArticleDOI
Continuity and Shallow Structures in Language Processing.
Harald Clahsen,Claudia Felser +1 more
TL;DR: The authors argued that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammar processing in one's native (first language) (L1) and proposed the shallow structure hypothesis (SSH) to account for the observed differences in processing.
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Morphologically Complex Words in L1 and L2 Processing: Evidence from Masked Priming Experiments in English.
Renita Silva,Harald Clahsen +1 more
TL;DR: This paper reported results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English.
References
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Ivan A. Sag,Carl Jesse Pollard +1 more
TL;DR: This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar, introduced in the authors' "Information-Based Syntax and Semantics," and demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems.
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Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies
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TL;DR: "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar" provides the definitive exposition of the theory of grammar originally proposed by Gerald Gazdar and developed during half a dozen years' work with his colleagues Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum, and Ivan Sag.