Referential context effects in non-native relative clause ambiguity resolution

Abstract

We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers’ interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first ( the assistant) or the second ( the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers’ and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners’ ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants’ disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers’. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders’ initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information.

Agreement attraction in native and non-native speakers of German

“…Thus, there was a lesser conflict between syntactic and lexical cues in the embedded conditions and L2 speakers behaved similarly to native speakers. This explanation is in line with research on L2 ambiguity resolution, which has found that L2 speakers prioritize lexico-semantic and pragmatic cues over structural cues to resolve different types of lexical and structural attachment ambiguities (Juffs, 1998;Juffs & Harrington, 1996;Felser et al, 2003;Pan & Felser, 2011;Pan, Schimke & Felser, 2015;Papadopoulou & Clahsen, 2003).…”

First Language Influence on Second Language Offline and Online Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

“…Therefore, learners of different L1s would pattern together showing L2‐specific processing profiles rather than L1 influence during online processing. Potential L1 influence would be restricted to behavior in offline tasks (Clahsen & Felser, ; Pan et al., ; Roberts et al., ). However, studies have also documented the reverse finding, with L1 effects surfacing during online processing but not in offline tasks (Hopp, ; Roberts & Liszka, ).…”

“…One crucial factor is the level of linguistic analysis at which L1 influence is investigated. While there is abundant evidence of L1 effects in phonetics and phonology (e.g., Flege, Munro, & MacKay, 1995;Hanulikova, Mitterer, & McQueen, 2011) and with respect to the lexicon (e.g., Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002), there are mixed findings when it comes to morphosyntactic and discourse-level phenomena (Clahsen & Felser, 2006;Hopp, 2010;Pan, Schimke, & Felser, 2015). The fact that L1 influence seems to be more elusive in these domains can, in turn, be related to at least two potential factors.…”

“…The first factor is the task used, particularly whether it directly targets the type of implicit knowledge used during language processing or assesses the outcome of this process, as is the case in offline tasks. Several online studies on L2 processing have reported that learners do not systematically take into account syntactic and morphological cues during sentence and discourse processing (Felser, Roberts, Marinis, & Gross, 2003;Felser & Cunning, 2012;Jiang, 2007;Marinis, Roberts, Felser, & Clahsen, 2005;Pan et al, 2015). Based on such findings, some researchers assume that L2 sentence and discourse processing is qualitatively different from L1 processing.…”

Theories and frameworks in second language processing

“…In another case, similar terminology refers to a bias for discourse-biased interpretations of globally ambiguous NP attachment ambiguities (Pan, Schimke & Felser, 2015), i.e., favor the syntactic attachment that yields an interpretation that better fits the discourse. It is hard to imagine this bias in terms of retrieval cues.…”