Second language (L2) processing may differ from processing in a native language in a variety of ways, and it has been argued that one major difference is that L2 learners can only construct shallow representations that lack structural details (Clahsen & Felser, 2006). The present study challenges this hypothesis by comparing the extent to which advanced Spanish-English L2 learners and English native speakers make use of the relative clause island constraint in constructing filler-gap dependencies. In off-line acceptability judgment and on-line self-paced reading experiments that used stimuli adapted from Traxler and Pickering (1996), both the L2 group and the native speaker control group demonstrate clear evidence for application of the relative clause island constraint. Our findings suggest that advanced L2 learners not only build abstract structural representations, but also rapidly constrain the active search for a gap location.These results cast doubt on the proposal that L2 learners are unable to build structural representations with grammatical precision.

This article documents a fairly rare kind of interlanguage phenomenon, namely one in which interlanguages exhibit syntactic constructions that are grammatical neither in a learner's native language nor in his or her target language, but are nevertheless typologically attested. The target construction is wh-scope marking, a cross-linguistically attested form of complex question formation. Using an elicited production experiment, an off-line acceptability judgment task and an on-line acceptability judgment task, it is argued that wh-scope marking is a genuine phenomenon in Japanese-English interlanguages despite the fact that it is ungrammatical both in English and in Japanese. Given that the acquisition of wh-scope marking cannot be explained by these learners' first language nor by their target language, the current study investigates what other mechanism these learners might be drawing on in their acquisition process. The article proposes that whscope marking in Japanese-English interlanguages results from a simplification strategy that learners adopt in order to ease the processing burden.