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Sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands in native and non-native sentence processing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2016

OLIVER BOXELL  and
CLAUDIA FELSER
OLIVER BOXELL
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam
CLAUDIA FELSER*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam
*
Address for correspondence: Dr. Claudia Felser, University of Potsdam, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24–25, 14476 Potsdam, Germanyfelser@uni-potsdam.de
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Abstract

We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study that investigated late German–English bilinguals’ sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands. The online reading experiment was complemented by an offline scalar judgement task. The results from the offline task confirmed that for both native and non-native speakers, subject island environments must normally be non-finite in order to host a parasitic gap. The analysis of the reading-time data showed that, while native speakers posited parasitic gaps in non-finite environments only, the non-native group initially overgenerated parasitic gaps, showing delayed sensitivity to island-inducing cues during online processing. Taken together, our findings show that non-native comprehenders are sensitive to exceptions to island constraints that are not attested in their native language and also rare in the L2 input. They need more time than native comprehenders to compute the linguistic representations over which the relevant restrictions are defined, however.

Keywords

Parasitic gapsisland constraintsbilingual sentence processingeye-movement monitoringEnglish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 494 - 511
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

Supplementary material can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1366728915000942
*

This research was supported by an Alexander-von-Humboldt professorship awarded to Harald Clahsen. We thank Robert Kluender, Matt Wagers and the BLC action editor and reviewers for helpful comments and discussion.

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