Syntactic Crossroads: Testing L2 sensitivity to Strong Crossover in an online experiment.

Abstract: We investigated sensitivity of non-native speakers of English to the Strong Crossover (SCO) constraint and Binding Principle C. Taking Clahsen & Felser’s (2006) Shallow Structure Hypothesis as a theoretical foundation, we tested whether non-native speakers would show a similar ability in predictively processing syntactic gaps in Strong Crossover configurations as had English native speakers in Kush et al. (2017)’s experiment, of which our study is an extension. One possibility was that non-native parsing is less detailed than native parsing and that structural parsing might not be used or not be used in a native-like manner, masking complex syntactic structures such as gaps. The other possibility was that native and non-native incremental parsing are similar to each other. In Experiment 1, an offline Acceptability Judgment Test, L2 learners demonstrated sensitivity to Strong Crossover configurations, showing that a dependency with a displaced wh-element is only considered as acceptable when no grammatical constraint prohibits binding, that is, in Non-Crossover configurations. In contrast, Crossover configurations, where binding of the pronoun by the wh-phrase is prohibited by Binding Principle C, were more often considered as unacceptable than as acceptable. In Experiment 2, an on-line Self-paced Reading Task, our results were largely consistent with Kush et al. (2017)’s results for native speakers. Our findings indicate that L2 antecedent retrieval in incremental parsing, similarly to native incremental parsing, ignores unlicensed distractors. Our findings suggest that L2 parsing, at least when processing Strong Crossover configurations, is similar to native incremental parsing.