Plausibility and structural reanalysis in L1 and L2 sentence comprehension

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Understanding how non-native speakers process language is crucial for effective language pedagogy.
• Investigating the role of semantic plausibility in resolving syntactic ambiguity offers insights into language comprehension mechanisms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the use of plausibility information in online sentence processing between native and non-native English speakers.
• To examine how different types of syntactic ambiguity (subordinate-clause and verb-particle constructions) affect processing for both groups.

Main Methods:

• A self-paced reading task was employed to measure reading times for sentences with temporary structural ambiguities.
• Two sentence types were used: subordinate-clause ambiguity sentences and sentences with adjacent/split verb-particle constructions (VPCs).

Main Results:

• Both native and non-native speakers utilized plausibility to recover from initial misanalyses in subordinate-clause ambiguity sentences.
• Native speakers successfully used plausibility for reanalysis in split VPC sentences.
• Non-native speakers exhibited persistent processing difficulties with split VPC sentences, irrespective of plausibility.

Conclusions:

• Plausibility information aids both native and non-native speakers in recovering from sentence misanalyses, even with significant syntactic revisions.
• Non-native speakers' difficulties with English VPCs stem from lexico-syntactic/semantic processing challenges, limiting their ability to use plausibility for recovery.