Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Discourse connectives (e.g., "but", "so") influence online discourse processing.
• Discourse relations can also be signaled by syntactic structures, an under-researched area.
• Processing of alternative discourse signals in a second language is unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate the role of syntactic parallelism in processing contrastive discourse relations.
• Compare native French speakers and English-native non-native French speakers.
• Examine the interaction between syntactic parallelism and connectives of varying explicitness.

Main Methods:

• Three self-paced reading experiments.
• Focus on contrastive relations signaled by syntactic parallelism.
• Manipulation of connective presence, frequency, and ambiguity.

Main Results:

• Syntactic parallelism is a significant cue for both native and non-native readers.
• Non-native speakers recruit parallelism more prominently than native speakers.
• The effect of parallelism on native speakers is modulated by task difficulty.

Conclusions:

• Syntactic parallelism is a crucial cue for processing discourse relations, particularly for non-native language learners.
• Native language processing strategies may differ in their reliance on syntactic cues compared to non-native speakers.
• Future research should explore the interplay of syntactic and lexical cues in L2 discourse processing.