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Interference in Native and Non-Native Sentence Processing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2017

IAN CUNNINGS Open the ORCID record for IAN CUNNINGS [Opens in a new window]
IAN CUNNINGS*
Affiliation:
University of Reading, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Dr Ian Cunnings, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK, RG6 7BEi.cunnings@reading.ac.uk
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Extract

The primary aim of my target article was to demonstrate how careful consideration of the working memory operations that underlie successful language comprehension is crucial to our understanding of the similarities and differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing. My central claims were that highly proficient L2 speakers construct similarly specified syntactic parses as L1 speakers, and that differences between L1 and L2 processing can be characterised in terms of L2 speakers being more prone to interference during memory retrieval operations. In explaining L1/L2 differences in this way, I argued a primary source of differences between L1 and L2 processing lies in how different populations of speakers weight cues that guide memory retrieval.

Type
Author's response
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , August 2017 , pp. 712 - 721
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the commentators for their in-depth discussion of the target article. It was impossible to fully do justice to all the comments that were made. I would also like to thank the editor for helpful comments on both the keynote article and my response.

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