Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing

Boxell, O., Felser, C. and Cunnings, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5318-0186 (2017) Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7 (5). pp. 554-582. ISSN 1879-9272 doi: 10.1075/lab.15006.box

Abstract/Summary

We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers' real-time processing of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), a type of verb phrase ellipsis in which the ellipsis gap forms part of its own antecedent. The resulting interpretation problem is traditionally thought to be solved by quantifier raising, a covert scope-shifting operation that serves to remove the gap from within its antecedent. Our L2 group comprised advanced, native German-speaking L2 learners of English. The analysis of the eye-movement data showed that both L1 and L2 English speakers tried to recover the missing verb phrase after encountering the gap. Only the native speakers showed evidence of ellipsis resolution being affected by quantification, however. No effects of quantification following gap detection were found in the L2 group, by contrast, indicating that recovery of the elided material was accomplished independently from the object's quantificational status in this group.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/65925
Identification Number/DOI	10.1075/lab.15006.box
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
Publisher	John Benjamins
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