Testing and Attesting the Use of Structural Information in L2 Sentence Processing

The development of second language (L2) syntax in the framework of generative grammar (Chomsky, 1981, 1986, 1995) has received considerable attention in the past few decades, particularly focusing on whether L2 grammatical representation is constrained by innate universal principles of grammar (for review, see Hawkins, 2001; White, 1989, 2003). However, as Gregg (1996) first pointed out, relatively little L2 research has addressed the developmental problem of language acquisition, i.e., how an L2 learner’s grammar changes from one stage to another. A proper treatment of this problem requires an explanation of how L2 learners parse and analyze the target language input since misparsing of the target language input could restructure their L2 grammar in non target-like ways. For example, Fodor (1998b) observes that if one misparses a sentence like “While Mary was mending the sock fell off her lap (p. 354)” and posits a pro as the subject of fell, then this could incorrectly trigger the positive value of the null subject parameter. In this respect, parsing is a causal process of grammatical change, and it is thus necessary to investigate L2 sentence processing in order to build a transition theory of L2 acquisition (for recent attempts to incorporate processing perspectives into a theory of L2 acquisition, see Carroll, 2001; Truscott & Sharwood-Smith, 2004). First language sentence processing research has revealed that multiple sources of information, such as syntactic, lexical-semantic, prosodic and discourse information, interact during sentence processing (for review, see Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1998). Of these types of information, it is particularly important for those interested in the development of L2 syntax to examine how the parser utilizes the grammatical information during L2 sentence processing. In this regard, recent research on L2 sentence processing by Felser, Marinis, Roberts & Gross (2003) deserves special attention, as they suggested that the L2 parser does not rely on syntactic information during sentence processing. This hypothesis could potentially have a huge impact on a transition theory of L2 acquisition: How does the parser inform the language acquisition mechanism if the target language is not analyzed based on syntactic information? The present paper addresses the validity of this hypothesis on theoretical and empirical grounds and concludes that this hypothesis is untenable. The following is the organization of the paper: Section 2 critically reviews the research by Felser et al. (2003) and shows that in order to investigate the above mentioned null hypothesis, it is necessary to examine a phenomenon that shows much clearer structural effects than what they investigated. Section 3 illustrates the experiment, a sentence complexity rating task, which was designed to test whether the L2 parser is sensitive to syntactic information. Section 4 discusses the implications of the findings with respect to the properties of the L2 parser and to the process of L2 acquisition. The final section concludes that the L2 parser is not incapable of using syntactic information.