Resumptive pronouns facilitate processing of long-distance relative clause dependencies in second language English

Fred Zenker,Bonnie D Schwartz

doi:10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4972

Fred Zenker, Bonnie D Schwartz

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4972

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Abstract

This study provides evidence that resumptive pronouns (RPs) can facilitate the processing of long-distance subject relative clause (RC) dependencies during second language (L2) sentence comprehension, even where they are disallowed in both the first language (L1) and the target language. A test group of 29 L1-Korean L2 learners (L2ers) of English and a control group of 25 native English speakers completed an online self-paced reading task (SPRT) and an offline acceptability judgment task (AJT) designed to test whether RPs reflect Interlanguage grammar representations and/or a strategy to alleviate processing overload. Analysis of the SPRT data from both response times and comprehension question accuracy indicates that RPs assisted the L2ers, but not the native speakers, with dependency resolution in long-distance RCs. For the AJT data, a proficiency effect was observed whereby some lower-proficiency L2ers, but not the higher-proficiency ones or the native speakers, tended to prefer RPs over gaps in long-distance RCs. The implications of these findings and plans for future research are discussed.

Highlights

This study examines resumptive relative clause (RC) dependencies, a type of phenomenon that is often observed in second language (L2) production even when it is ungrammatical in both the first language (L1) and the target language (TL)
In a follow-up offline judgment task, participants tended to reject [island, resumptive] trials and to accept [non-island, gap] trials. These results show that even though resumptive pronouns (RPs) are highly unacceptable in English, the resumptive strategy is still preferable to the filler-gap strategy in processing during production when speakers are induced to relativize from islands
Planned pairwise comparisons showed that RP trials were read significantly slower than gap trials in the short environment (β = 0.133, p = .014) but not in the long environment; this indicates, if anything, that RPs made processing slightly harder for the native speakers in the short environment, perhaps due to surprisal

Summary

Introduction

This study examines resumptive relative clause (RC) dependencies, a type of phenomenon that is often observed in second language (L2) production even when it is ungrammatical in both the first language (L1) and the target language (TL). In resumptive RCs, a pronoun or full NP occupies the gap position in what would otherwise be a filler-gap dependency. (1) * Sometimes I typed an article, a noun, an adjective, or an adverb that I thought it would fit into the context These types of Interlanguage (IL) phenomena constitute one of the most interesting areas of L2 research because they cannot be traced to either L1 transfer or TL input, offering us a chance to learn more about the basic properties of the human language system. Keenan and Comrie (1977) were among the first to collect crosslinguistic data on the distribution of gaps and RPs in RC dependencies.

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