Online Processing of Wh-Dependencies in English by Native Speakers of Spanish

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.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Kansas

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Canales, Alonso Jose

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Gabriele, Alison
• Fiorentino, Robert

• Linguistics
• Island constraints
• Online sentence processing
• Shallow structures hypothesis
• SLA
• Spanish
• Wh-movement

Statement dc:rights

• This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:12313

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/10281