Lee Juyoung, Witzel Jeffrey
English Language and Literature Studies (ELLS) Programme, BNU-HKBU United International College, Zhuhai, China.
Department of Linguistics & TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2023 Feb;76(2):319-337. doi: 10.1177/17470218221092400. Epub 2022 May 13.
This study examines whether English native speakers and highly proficient non-native speakers make comparable use of plausibility information during online sentence processing. Two sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations-subordinate-clause ambiguity sentences and sentences with adjacent/split verb-particle constructions (VPCs)-were tested in a self-paced reading task. In the subordinate-clause ambiguity sentences, the pattern of reading times indicated that both native and non-native speakers used plausibility to recover from initial structural misanalysis. Native speakers were also able to use this information during syntactic and semantic reanalysis in the sentences involving split VPCs. Non-native speakers, however, showed persistent processing difficulty for split VPC sentences, regardless of plausibility. These results are taken to indicate that both native speakers and non-native speakers use plausibility information to recover from misanalysis, even in sentences that require major syntactic revision. The only clear limit on non-native speakers' ability to use this information related to lexico-syntactic/semantic processing difficulty, in that they appeared to be unable to use this information to recover from misanalysis associated with the structural properties of English VPCs.
本研究考察了以英语为母语者和英语水平很高的非母语者在在线句子处理过程中是否同等程度地利用合理性信息。在一项自定步速阅读任务中，对两种涉及暂时歧义结构配置的句子类型进行了测试，即从句歧义句和带有相邻/分裂动词短语结构（VPC）的句子。在从句歧义句中，阅读时间模式表明，以英语为母语者和非母语者都利用合理性从最初的结构错误分析中恢复过来。以英语为母语者在涉及分裂VPC的句子的句法和语义重新分析过程中也能够利用此信息。然而，非母语者在分裂VPC句子上表现出持续的处理困难，无论其合理性如何。这些结果表明，以英语为母语者和非母语者都利用合理性信息从错误分析中恢复过来，即使在需要进行重大句法修订的句子中也是如此。非母语者使用此信息的能力的唯一明显限制与词汇句法/语义处理困难有关，因为他们似乎无法利用此信息从与英语VPC结构属性相关的错误分析中恢复过来。
