This study examined whether resolving ambiguous pronouns in a second language is guided by the L1 preferences of the learners. Given the fact that the typologically closely related languages, German and Dutch, have both been found to use personal pronouns (German er, Dutch hij; 'he') to refer to topical antecedents, and d-pronouns (German der, Dutch die; 'he') for non-topical coreference (Ellert 2010;Kaiser 2011;Kaiser and Trueswell 2004), it was asked whether Dutch L2 learners of German would exhibit similar preferences when resolving the two pronominal forms in their L2. This was examined with the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm and an off-line referent assignment task. The results showed differences in resolution patterns: the Dutch learners of German showed an overall topic preference across pronouns which became more target-like at higher proficiency levels. This suggests that L2 information organization cannot be merely explained by L1 influences, but needs to take more general L2 learner effects into account.

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In this article, we present the results of a written sentence completion task in German which investigated the influence of antecedent animacy and position on the choice of referential expression. Such an effect has been shown for English (Fukumura & Gompel 2011). However, in contrast to English where speakers in these contexts generally chose to realize reference via full NPs or personal pronouns, in German speakers may also apply demonstrative pronouns (Ellert & Holler 2011). Thus, the current study asked whether this cross-linguistic difference would also lead to differences in reference realizations.

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