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Abstract:
Language learners can often use their first-language
syntactic parsing strategies to process sentences in their second
language, but how do they process second language syntactic
structures that are not available in their first language? This
study explored the on-line sentence processing of English-speaking
learners of French as they read syntactically complex French
structures, using a version of the moving window procedure.
Subjects were presented with target sentences that either had or
did not have clitic pronouns and that either used or did not use
the causative construction:
It had been predicted that these advanced learners of French
would be sensitive to the crosslinguistic differences in syntax.
Instead, the subjects appeared to employ compensatory processing
strategies, devoting most of their attention to lexical retrieval,
with only gross syntactic or semantic integration around the matrix
verb (average reaction time for the matrix verb (597 ms),
significantly longer than the reaction times for both the direct
object (453 ms) and the end of clauses (489 ms) (F(2,42) = 7.89,
p<.001)), irrespective of the difficulty of the grammatical
context. Nonetheless, these subjects displayed near-perfect
comprehension of these complex syntactic structures. Comparison of
these results with those from fully functional English-French
bilinguals suggests that more refined processing develops from
lexical and semantic processing to the most salient syntactic
features of the constructions being processed. Significant
differences (F(1,69) = 34.45, p<.024) were observed between the
groups for processing the end of the clauses, the bilingual
subjects having longer reaction times at the end of the
syntactically most complex sentences, whereas the advanced learners
were insensitive to the grammatical context. Overall,
differentiated processing attuned to French syntax seems to be
acquired quite late by English-speaking learners of French.
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