The timing of lexical and syntactic processes in second language sentence comprehension

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates how lexical processing difficulty affects second language (L2) syntactic processing. In a self-paced reading experiment with 36 monolingual and 62 first language German speakers of English, we test how differences in lexical frequency moderate structural processing differences between subject and object clefts. For the L2 group, the results show linear relations between verb frequency and the location of the reading difficulty resulting from the structurally more complex object clefts. Native speakers evince comparable effects only in lower word frequency ranges. The findings indicate that greater demands on lexical processing may cause non-native-like syntactic processing in that they attenuate and delay effects of structure building in L2 sentence processing. We discuss implications for current models of L2 sentence processing.