Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension

Fujita, H. and Cunnings, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5318-0186 (2021) Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24 (4). pp. 628-641. ISSN 1469-1841 doi: 10.1017/S1366728921000195

Abstract/Summary

We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like “While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily”. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (“laughed”), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (“the baby”) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (“dressed”). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/97700
Identification Number/DOI	10.1017/S1366728921000195
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	Cambridge University Press
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