Timed Comprehension of Binding in Advanced L2 Learners of English

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how advanced L2 learners of English interpret reflexive anaphors such as himself and pronominals such as him in sentences such as John said Peter helps himself and John said Peter helps him. Parameterized Binding Theory claims that the settings for the governing category parameter dictate whether particular anaphors or pronominals are bound to other noun phrases; the five possible settings are related in opposite hierarchies of inclusiveness for anaphors and pronominals according to the Subset Principle. An experiment is described that tested the interpretation of himself and him across five sentence types by 14 native speakers and 47 advanced L2 learners of English from three different language backgrounds—Japanese, Romance, and Norwegian. A computer‐controlled comprehension task gave the subjects 40 sentences, for each of which they had to decide whether him or himself referred to John or Peter by pressing the appropriate key. The results showed (1) anaphors were slightly more difficult than were pronominals overall, (2) pronominals were not treated as anaphors, (3) a consistent order of difficulty was found for the five sentence types, with certain exceptions, (4) common orders of difficulty and of response time occurred in all groups regardless of first language, again with exceptions, and (5) on one view the Subset Principle was positively related to difficulty for anaphors, negatively for pronominals. The discussion concerns the validity of comprehension tests as evidence for the Universal Grammar model. It is suggested that the results show that parameter settings are related to performance as well as to grammatical competence.