Contextual Facilitation Effect on EFL Learners' Reflexive Anaphora Resolution: Evidence from Eye Movements

Guided by cue-based retrieval theory, this study investigates Chinese EFL learners' reflexive anaphora resolution, focusing on whether gender information is utilized during online processing and whether prior discourse context supports this process under different levels of syntactic demand. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 showed that learners exhibited early sensitivity to antecedent-reflexive gender mismatch when antecedent-related gender information was supported by prior discourse, although reading patterns did not differ reliably between strong- and weak-context conditions. Experiment 2 further showed that early gender-mismatch sensitivity remained detectable in garden-path sentences, despite increased processing demands associated with syntactic reanalysis. Together, these findings suggest that antecedent-related discourse information can support online L2 reflexive processing and that gender-sensitive processing remains available when reflexive resolution occurs under increased syntactic demands. The findings extend cue-based retrieval approaches by suggesting that prior discourse context can modulate the accessibility and weighting of retrieval cues during L2 reflexive processing.