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Second language processing and revision of garden-path sentences: a visual word study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2015

LUCIA POZZAN  and
JOHN C. TRUESWELL
LUCIA POZZAN*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
JOHN C. TRUESWELL
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
Address for correspondence: Lucia Pozzan, Department of Psychology and Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 422, Philadelphia, PA, 19104. lpozzan@sas.upenn.edu
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Abstract

We asked whether children's well-known difficulties revising initial sentence processing commitments characterize the immature or the learning parser. Adult L2 speakers of English acted out temporarily ambiguous and unambiguous instructions. While online processing patterns indicate that L2 adults experienced garden-paths and were sensitive to referential information to a similar degree as native adults, their act-out patterns indicate increased difficulties revising initial interpretations, at rates similar to those observed for 5-year-old native children (e.g., Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999). We propose that L2 learners’ difficulties with revision stem from increased recruitment of cognitive control networks during processing of a not fully proficient language, resulting in the reduced availability of cognitive control for parsing revisions.

Keywords

second language acquisitionsentence processinggarden-path sentencessentence revision
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 636 - 643
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Alon Hafri for assistance with E Prime programming and Kristina Woodard for recording the materials. We also thank the study participants and the Venetian Institute for Molecular Medicine (VIMM) for providing space and assistance with data collection in Italy. This work was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant 1-R01-HD-37507 awarded to Lila R. Gleitman and John C. Trueswell.

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