Lingering misinterpretation in native and nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from structural priming

Abstract

Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers sometimes misinterpret temporarily ambiguous sentences like “When Mary dressed the baby laughed happily.” Recent studies suggest that the initially assigned misinterpretation (“Mary dressed the baby”) may persist even after disambiguation, and that L2 speakers may have particular difficulty discarding initial misinterpretations. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers are more persistent with misinterpretation compared with L1 speakers during sentence processing, using the structural priming and eye tracking while reading tasks. In the experiment, participants read prime followed by target sentences. Reading times revealed that unambiguous but not ambiguous prime sentences facilitated processing of the globally correct interpretation of ambiguous target sentences. However, this priming effect was only observed when the prime and target sentence shared the same verb. Comprehension accuracy rates were not significantly influenced by priming effects but did provide evidence of lingering misinterpretation. We did not find significant L1/L2 differences in either priming effects or persistence of misinterpretation. Together, these results suggest that initially assigned misinterpretations linger in both L1 and L2 readers during sentence processing and that L1 and L2 comprehension priming is strongly lexically mediated.

Structural priming: An experimental paradigm for mapping linguistic representations

“…The finding suggests that the incorrect analysis was not entirely deactivated, a conclusion consistent with earlier findings from other paradigms (e.g., Christianson et al, 2001). Similar priming from the initial incorrect analysis was also observed with second language learners of English (Fujita & Cunnings, 2021).…”

Interference and filler-gap dependency formation in native and non-native language comprehension.

“…Many previous studies have investigated the similarities and differences between L1 and L2 sentence processing. Some previous studies have shown similar sentence processing patterns between L1 and L2 speakers (Cheng et al, 2021; Cunnings & Fujita, 2021a, 2021b; Felser et al, 2012; Foote, 2011; Fujita & Cunnings, 2021a, 2021b; Lago & Felser, 2018; Lim & Christianson, 2015; Omaki & Schulz, 2011; Tanner et al, 2012), whereas others have observed different patterns (Felser et al, 2003, 2009; Felser & Cunnings, 2012; Fujita & Cunnings, 2020; Jiang, 2004; Keating, 2009; Marinis et al, 2005; Papadopoulou & Clahsen, 2003). Some previous studies have reported that interference affects L1 and L2 dependency formation differently.…”

On the parsing of garden-path sentences

“…2 A central assumption in the study of garden-path effects had been that upon disambiguation, the processor constructs globally correct structures. However, this assumption has been questioned by previous studies which have reported that the processor often persists with misinterpretations after disambiguation (Christianson et al, 2001(Christianson et al, , 2006, 2021a, 2021bSlattery et al, 2013;Sturt, 2007;van Gompel et al, 2006). For example, in Christianson et al (2001), participants read sentences with a subject-object ambiguity such as "While Mary dressed the girl drank some water", where "the girl" must be analysed as the main clause subject but is assumed to be initially misanalysed as the complement of "dressed".…”