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Online Processing of Wh-Dependencies in English by Native Speakers of Spanish
Canales, Alonso Jose
Canales, Alonso Jose
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Abstract
This study investigated if, Spanish-speaking learners of English are capable of processing wh-dependencies incrementally and observing the grammatical constraints that regulate wh-extraction in English, similar to native speakers. The study included two self-paced reading experiments run in a word-by-word non-cumulative moving window paradigm (Just et al., 1982). Experiment 1 tested if second language (L2) learners process wh-dependencies incrementally by looking at wh-extraction from positions licensed by the grammar. Experiment 2 focused on testing if learners respect syntactic constraints that forbid wh-extraction from positions not licensed by the grammar, to be specific, extraction out of relative clause islands. The data collected in both experiments were subject to a residual reading times analysis. The results of the two experiments suggest that Spanish-speaking learners of English process wh-dependencies incrementally and that they abide by grammatical constraints in the course of online processing which prevent them from extracting a wh-element outside of a relative clause island. At the theoretical level, our findings suggest that the claim of the Shallow Structures Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006 a,b) that adult second language learners are `shallow processors' who do not have access to abstract syntax during parsing is too strong.
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Date
2012-08-31
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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Keywords
Linguistics, Island constraints, Online sentence processing, Shallow structures hypothesis, SLA, Spanish, Wh-movement