Processing of Chinese Base-Generated-Topic Sentences by L1-Korean Speakers: An Eye-Tracking Study

According to the shallow structure hypothesis (SSH), adult L2 learners rely more on lexical-semantic and pragmatic information but less so on syntactic information in online language processing, ending up with shallower syntactic representation. To test the SSH, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment on L1-Korean L2-Chinese learners with native Chinese speakers as the baseline, investigating their processing of Chinese base-generated-topic sentences (BGT). The results show that both the intermediate and advanced Korean learners of Chinese are sensitive to and can make use of syntactic information, but only the advanced learners are sensitive to the semantic constraint when processing Chinese BGT sentences, providing evidence against the SSH.