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L2 sentence processing strategies of late learners and heritage speakers: The Evidence from Mandarin-English Bilinguals

Date

2021-07-19

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Journal ISSN

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Thesis

Degree Level

Masters

Abstract

This study investigates different processing strategies of L1 Mandarin speakers processing complex sentences in L2 English. Heritage speakers, L2 learners, and native English speakers as a control group were compared. This study tested the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) which argues that second language processing differs from first language processing. Age of acquisition (AoA) and L2 dominance were factored in to determine the difference between L2 learners and heritage speakers. In an online grammatical-Maze experiment, 72 participants completed a processing task on three sentential items: relative clause modifying subject (RCS), relative clause modifying object (RCO), and adverb phrase modifying predicate (ADVP). The results show that with an early AoA and using L2 English dominantly, heritage speakers show native speaker-like processing patterns. While late L2 learners have an opposite pattern of processing RCS and RCO items, they show a native speaker-like pattern on the ADVP item. This suggests that AoA is a critical predictor of processing relative clause attachment but not for ADVP attachment. L2 dominance does not predict attachment preference on the RCS and ADVP items in the statistical results. However, it predicts that bilingual participants process RCO sentences comparable to native speakers. Based on the SSH, these predictions from AoA and L2 dominance are to be attributed to different weightings of the two pathways (i.e., syntactic and heuristic) in the sentence parser of L2 learners. When parsing complex sentences, the weightings of both the syntactic and heuristic pathways are not only affected by AoA but also significantly affected by L2 dominance. Also, different syntactic structures of processing are likely taking variant effects from AoA and L2 dominance. Overall, this study provides evidence of AoA and L2 dominance critically affecting L2 processing which needs to be taken into account as part of the SSH.

Description

Keywords

psycholinguistics, L2 processing, heritage speakers, senence processing, grammatical processing

Citation

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Department

Linguistics

Program

Linguistics

Advisor

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