Locus of difficulty in processing L2 English object relative clauses: A study with Korean university students

Abstract

Previous work on L2 sentence processing shows that L2 learners are sensitive to the greater processing complexity of object relative clauses as compared with subject relative clauses in English as are native speakers of the language. The exact locus of this effect within the relative clause, however, is yet to be empirically determined. In a self-paced reading paradigm with 27 Korean university students, English object relative clauses with an animate subject were contrasted with those that contained an inanimate subject (e.g. The woman that the teenager on the car injured ... vs. The woman that the accident on the road inured ...). Comparable simple sentences embedded as an extraposed that-clause were also tested as a control (e.g., It was verified that the teenager/accident on the road injured the woman ...). The results suggest that the processing difficulty of object relative clauses materializes before the relative clause verb, and that animacy effects appear at both the subject and verb of the relative clause but in different patterns. The findings are discussed in relation to sentence processing theories.