Plausibility and structural reanalysis in L1 and L2 sentence comprehension

Abstract

This study examines whether English native speakers and highly proficient non-native speakers make comparable use of plausibility information during online sentence processing. Two sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations—subordinate-clause ambiguity sentences and sentences with adjacent/split verb-particle constructions (VPCs)—were tested in a self-paced reading task. In the subordinate-clause ambiguity sentences, the pattern of reading times indicated that both native and non-native speakers used plausibility to recover from initial structural misanalysis. Native speakers were also able to use this information during syntactic and semantic reanalysis in the sentences involving split VPCs. Non-native speakers, however, showed persistent processing difficulty for split VPC sentences, regardless of plausibility. These results are taken to indicate that both native speakers and non-native speakers use plausibility information to recover from misanalysis, even in sentences that require major syntactic revision. The only clear limit on non-native speakers’ ability to use this information related to lexico-syntactic/semantic processing difficulty, in that they appeared to be unable to use this information to recover from misanalysis associated with the structural properties of English VPCs.