On the usefulness of formal judgment tasks in syntax and in second-language research: The case of resumptive pronouns in English, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese

Hitz, John; Francis, Elaine J.

doi:10.1515/ling-2016-0033

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 28 publications

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“…Given the hypothesis that L2 speakers are more susceptible to cognitive resource limitations than monolingual speakers (Hopp, 2014), L2 speakers are equally (if not more) likely to adopt a resumption strategy to reduce processing burden on the underlying parsing mechanism. This is especially true for those L2 speakers whose L1 allows resumption (Gass, 1979), suggesting that inserting a resumptive pronoun in RCs potentially reflects an L2 developmental stage in the acquisition of RCs regardless of L1, which may persist longer in L2ers whose L1 grammaticalizes resumption (Hitz, 2012).…”

Section: Previous Research On L2 Resumptionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English

Solaimani

Myles²,

Lawyer

2023

Second Language Research

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Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first language (L1) to L2. While evidence seems to suggest that there are significant L1–L2 differences in the processing of RCs, relatively little is known about the source of non-target-like L2 behaviour. The present study investigates the grammatical acceptability of different RC types in L2 English and whether reliance on a resumptive strategy is a syntactic or processing issue. The participants included 71 L1-Persian L2-English, 52 L1-French L2-English, and 44 native English speakers, who completed a proficiency c-test, a grammaticality judgment task, and a reading span working memory (WM) task. Unlike French, which is similar to English in the syntactic derivation of RCs, Persian is a structurally wh-in-situ language that syntactically allows resumption in direct object and object-of-preposition RCs. The results showed that unlike L1-French speakers, L1-Persian speakers were more likely to accept resumptive pronouns in L2-English RCs; however, both L1 and L2 groups overwhelmingly preferred a gap over a resumptive strategy. The results suggest that given sufficiently high proficiency and long immersion experience, L2 speakers can match native speakers in terms of RC syntactic representations, suggesting that the issue faced by learners is a processing issue rather a representational one as suggested by the Interpretability Hypothesis.

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Section: Previous Research On L2 Resumptionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English

Solaimani

Myles²,

Lawyer

2023

Second Language Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

On the usefulness of formal judgment tasks in syntax and in second-language research: The case of resumptive pronouns in English, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract: Gibson and Fedorenko (2013, The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research,

Cited by 1 publication

References 28 publications

Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English

Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English

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