Processing empty categories in a second language: When naturalistic exposure fills the (intermediate) gap

An fMRI study on the processing of long-distance wh-movement in a second language

“…Therefore, the limited available evidence appears to favour the SSH; however, and similar to the original behavioural studies that supported the SSH, the evidence is based on L2 learners with limited L2 immersion. It remains to be seen whether more immersed learners will show a different pattern of effects, similar to the reported behavioural data (Pliatsikas & Marinis 2013), and critically whether their patterns of brain activity will provide support to the alternative models for L2 syntactic processing.…”

“…Previous research using behavioural tasks has suggested that L2 learners are capable of processing long-distance dependencies in their L2 in a similar way to native speakers (Pliatsikas & Marinis 2013). The present study follows this up by investigating whether these processing patterns will also be expressed in terms of brain activity.…”

“…Based on Pliatsikas & Marinis (2013), we expected all of our participants to demonstrate the extraction effect, since they are capable of processing long-distance dependencies; however, we only expected the most immersed of our participants to show the facilitation effect of the intermediate gap.…”

“…Similarly, the effects of naturalistic exposure, or immersion, in the processing of syntax are not accounted for by the SSH (Dussias & Sagarra 2007;Pliatsikas & Chondrogianni 2015). In order to address the issue of immersion effects, Pliatsikas & Marinis (2013) replicated the Marinis et al (2005) study by testing a group of highly-immersed (9 years) L2 learners of English, along with a group of classroom-exposed learners (similar to the L2 groups in Marinis et al), and a group of native speakers of English. Pliatsikas & Marinis found that, although the classroom-exposed group demonstrated SSH-compatible parsing strategies, the naturalistic exposed group demonstrated native-like performance in detecting and processing the abstract traces of syntactic movement.…”

“…To that end, we tested Greek non-native speakers of English in an fMRI-adapted version of the Marinis et al (2005) task. Based on the findings from Pliatsikas & Marinis (2013), L2 learners were expected to show evidence of loading the wh-phrase in working memory and actively seeking for a syntactic gap to integrate it. Since the bilateral STG, MTG and IFG have all been implicated in processing of wh-movement, we predicted increased activation of these regions for sentences containing wh-extractions (EVP and ENP), compared to control sentences without extractions (NVP and NNP).…”