2,332
Views
66
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Articles

Working Memory Effects in the L2 Processing of Ambiguous Relative Clauses

Pages 250-278 | Received 12 Dec 2012, Accepted 30 Sep 2013, Published online: 19 Jun 2014

REFERENCES

  • Allan, Dave. 1992. The Oxford Placement Test. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Alptekin, Cem & Gulcan Erçetin. 2010. The role of L1 and L2 working memory in literal and inferential comprehension in L2 reading. Journal of Research in Reading 33. 206–219.
  • Ariji, Kenji, Akira Omaki & Nano Tatsuta. 2003. Working memory restricts the use of semantic information in ambiguity resolution. In Peter Slezak (ed.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Science, 19–25. Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales.
  • Augurzky, Petra, Kai Alter & Thomas Pechmann. 2004. The influence of prosody on reading—An ERP study on relative clause attachment. In Proceedings of the Second CamLing Postgraduate Conference on Language Research, 58–64 Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
  • Baayen, R. Harald, Doug J. Davidson & Douglas M. Bates. 2008. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59(4). 390–412.
  • Bartek, Brian, Richard L. Lewis, Shravan Vasishth & Mason R. Smith. 2011. In search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 37. 1178–1198.
  • Boland, Julie E. & Allison Blodgett. 2001. Understanding the constraints on syntactic generation: Lexical bias and discourse congruency effects on eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language 45. 391–411.
  • Brysbaert, Marc & Don C. Mitchell. 1996. Modifier attachment in sentence parsing: Evidence from Dutch. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A 49. 664–695.
  • Caplan, David & Gloria S. Waters. 1999. Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension. Brain and Behavioral Sciences 22. 77–126.
  • Carreiras, Manuel & Chuck Clifton. 1999. Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English. Memory and Cognition 27. 826–833.
  • Clahsen, Harald & Claudia Felser. 2006. Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics 27. 3–42.
  • Coderre, Emily, Walter J. B. van Heuven & Kathy Conklin. 2011. Lexical processing is delayed by 100 ms in a second language. Talk presented at the Workshop on Bilingualism: Neurolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives, September 13, Aix en Provence.
  • Conway, Andrew R. A., Michael J. Kane, Michael F. Bunting, D. Zach Jambrick, Oliver Wilhelm & Randall W. Engle. 2005. Working memory span tasks: A methodological review and a user’s guide. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12. 769–786.
  • Cuetos, Fernando & Don C. Mitchell. 1988. Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the late closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition 30. 73–105.
  • Dallas, Andrea C. & Edith Kaan. 2008. Second language processing of filler-gap dependencies by late learners. Language and Linguistics Compass 2. 372–388.
  • Daneman, Meredyth & Patricia Carpenter. 1980. Individual differences in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19. 450–466.
  • Dekydtspotter, Laurent, Bonnie D. Schwartz & Rex A. Sprouse. 2006. The comparative fallacy in L2 processing research. In Mary Grantham O’Brien, Christine Shea & John Archibald ( eds.), Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006): The Banff Conference, 33–40. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Dussias, Paola E. 2003. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in L2 learners: Some effects of bilinguality on L1 and L2 processing strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 25. 529–557.
  • Dussias, Paola E. 2010. Uses of eyetracking data in second language sentence processing research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30. 149–166.
  • Dussias, Paola E. & Pilar Pinar. 2010. Effects of reading span and plausibility in the reanalysis of wh-gaps by Chinese-English second language speakers. Second Language Research 26. 443–472.
  • Eastwick, Tim & Colin Phillips. 1999. Variability in semantic cue effectiveness on syntactic ambiguity resolution: Inducing low-span performance in high-span readers. Paper presented at AMLaP 99, University of Edinburgh, UK.
  • Farmer, Thomas A., Jennifer B. Misyak & Morten H. Christiansen. 2012. Individual differences in sentence processing. In M. J. Spivey, K. McRae & M. Joanisse ( eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics, 354–365. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Fedorenko, Evelina, Steven T. Piantadosi & Edward Gibson. 2012. The interaction of syntactic and lexical information sources in language processing: The case of the noun-verb ambiguity. Journal of Cognitive Science 13. 249–285.
  • Felser, Claudia, Theodoris Marinis & Harald Clahsen. 2003. Children’s processing of ambiguous sentences: A study of relative clause attachment. Language Acquisition 3. 127–163.
  • Felser, Claudia & Leah Roberts. 2007. Processing wh-dependencies in a second language: A cross-modal priming study. Second Language Research 23. 9–36.
  • Felser, Claudia, Leah Roberts, Theodoris Marinis & Rebecca Gross. 2003. The processing of ambiguous sentences by first and second language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics 24. 453–489.
  • Fernández, Eva. 2003. Bilingual sentence processing. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Fodor, Janet D. 2002. Prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. In M. Hirotani (ed.), NELS 32, 113–132. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.
  • Frazier, Lynn. 1978. On comprehending sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies. Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut, Storrs, dissertation.
  • Frazier, Lynn & Chuck Clifton. 1996. Construal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Frenck-Mestre, Cheryl. 2002. An on-line look at sentence processing in the second language. In Roberto Heredia & Jeanette Altarriba ( eds.), Bilingual sentence processing, 217–236. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  • Frenck-Mestre, Cheryl & Joel Pynte. 1997. Syntactic ambiguity resolution while reading in second and native languages. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 50A. 119–148.
  • Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68. 1–76.
  • Gibson, Edward. 2006. The interaction of top-down and bottom-up statistics in the resolution of syntactic category ambiguity. Journal of Memory and Language 54. 363–388.
  • Gibson, Edward, Neal J. Pearlmutter, Enriqueta Canseco-González & Gregory Hickok. 1996. Cross-linguistic attachment preferences: Evidence from English and Spanish. Cognition 59. 23–59.
  • Goethe Institute. 2010. German placement test. http://www.goethe.de/cgi-bin/einstufungstest/einstufungstest.pl (October 2013).
  • Gordon, Peter C., Randall Hendrick, Marcus Johnson & Yoonhyoung Lee. 2006. Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 32. 1304–1321.
  • Gordon, Peter C. & William H. Levine. 2002. Memory-load interference in syntactic processing. Psychological Science 13. 425–430.
  • Grodner, Daniel & Edward Gibson. 2005. Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input. Cognitive Science 29. 261–290.
  • Havik, Else, Leah Roberts, Roeland van Hout, Rob Schreuder & Marco Haverkort. 2009. Processing subject–object ambiguities in the L2: A self-paced reading study with German L2 learners of Dutch. Language Learning 59. 73–112.
  • Hemforth, Barbara, Lars Konieczny & Christoph Scheepers. 2000. Modifier attachment: Relative clauses and coordinations. In B. Hemforth (ed.), German sentence processing, 161–186. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Hopp, Holger. 2006. Syntactic features and reanalysis in near-native processing. Second Language Research 22. 369–397.
  • Hopp, Holger. 2010. Ultimate attainment in L2 inflectional morphology: Performance similarities between non-native and native speakers. Lingua 120. 901–931.
  • Hopp, Holger. 2013. Individual differences in the L2 processing of object-subject ambiguities. Applied Psycholinguistics. doi:10.1017/S0142716413000180. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8888090
  • Indefrey, Peter. 2006. It’s time to work towards explicit processing models for native and L2 speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics 27. 66–69.
  • Jackson, Carrie N. & Susan C. Bobb. 2009. The processing and comprehension of wh-questions among second language speakers of German. Applied Psycholinguistics 30. 603–636.
  • Jiang, Nan. 2004. Morphological insensitivity in second language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics 25. 603–634.
  • Juffs, Alan. 2004. Representation, processing, and working memory in a second language. Transactions of the Philological Society 102. 199–225.
  • Juffs, Alan & Michael Harrington. 2011. Aspects of working memory in L2 learning. Language Teaching 44. 137–166.
  • Just, Marcel A. & Patricia A. Carpenter. 1992. A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review 99. 122–149.
  • Keating, Gregory D. 2010. The effects of linear distance and working memory on the processing of gender agreement in Spanish. In B. VanPatten & J. Jegerski ( eds.), Research in second language processing and parsing, 113–134. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Kim, Ji H. 2010. The influence of sentence complexity and working memory on relative clause ambiguity resolution. Language and Linguistics 48. 1–26.
  • Kim, Ji H. & Kiel Christiansen. 2012. Sentence complexity and working memory effects in ambiguity resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 42(5). 393–411.
  • Kimball, John. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition 2. 15–47.
  • Kroll, Judith. 2006. Reading & speaking words in two languages: A problem in representation & control. Paper presented at the The Neurocognition of Second Language: A CBBC Workshop, April 7, Georgetown University.
  • Lewis, Richard L., Shravan Vasishth & Julie A. Van Dyke. 2006. Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10. 447–454.
  • Long, Deborah L. & Chantel S. Prat. 2008. Individual differences in syntactic ambiguity resolution: Readers vary in their use of plausibility information. Memory and Cognition 36. 375–391.
  • MacDonald, Maryellen C. & Morten H. Christiansen. 2002. Reassessing working memory: A comment on Just & Carpenter (1992) and Waters & Caplan (1996). Psychological Review 109. 35–54.
  • Marinis, Theodoris, Leah Roberts, Claudia Felser & Harald Clahsen. 2005. Gaps in second language sentence processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 27. 53–78.
  • McDonald, Janet L. 2006. Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. Journal of Memory and Language 55. 381–401.
  • McDonald, Janet L. & Christine C. Roussel. 2010. Past tense grammaticality judgment and production in non-native and stressed native English speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13. 429–448.
  • Mendelsohn, Aurora & Neal Pearlmutter. 1999. Individual differences in relative clause attachment preferences. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, November 18–21, Los Angeles, CA.
  • Miyake, Akira & Naama Friedman. 1998. Individual differences in second language proficiency: Working memory as language aptitude. In A. F. Healy & L. E. Bourne ( eds.), Foreign language learning: Psycholinguistic studies on training and retention, 339–364. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Nakano, Yoko & Marian Wang. 2011. Relative-clause attachments in L1 and L2 English of Japanese learners: An offline questionnaire and eye-tracking studies. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), July 19–23, York.
  • Omaki, Akira. 2005. Working memory and relative clause attachment in first and second language processing. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu, unpublished master’s dissertation.
  • Omaki, Akira & Barbara Schulz. 2011. Filler-gap dependencies and island constraints in second language sentence processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33. 563–588.
  • Papadopoulou, Despina & Harald Clahsen. 2003. Parsing strategies in L1 and L2 sentence processing: A study of relative clause attachment in Greek. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24. 501–528.
  • Pearlmutter, Neal J. & Maryellen C. MacDonald. 1995. Individual differences and probabilistic constraints in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 34. 521–542.
  • Rah, Anne. 2009. Sentence processing in a second language: Ambiguity resolution in German learners of English. Cologne, Germany: University of Cologne unpublished doctoral dissertation.
  • Rayner, Keith. 1998. Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin 124. 372–422.
  • Rayner, Keith & Alexander Pollatsek. 2006. Eye-movement control in reading. In Matthew Traxler & Morton Ann Gernsbacher ( eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics, 613–658. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  • Roberts, Leah. 2012. Individual differences in second language sentence processing. Language Learning 62. 162–188.
  • Sagarra, Nuria. 2013. Working memory in second language acquisition. In Carol A. Chapelle (ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1286
  • Schneider, Walter, Amy Eschman & Anthony Zuccolotto. 2002. E-prime reference guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.
  • Segalowitz, Norman & Jan Hulstijn. 2005. Automaticity in bilingualism and second language learning. In Judith Kroll & Annette de Groot ( eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches, 371–388. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Segalowitz, Norman & Sidney J. Segalowitz. 1993. Skilled performance, practice, and the differentiation of speed-up from automatization effects: Evidence from second language word recognition. Applied Psycholinguistics 14. 369–385.
  • Segalowitz, Sidney J., Norman Segalowitz & Anthony Wood. 1998. Assessing the development of automaticity in second language word recognition. Applied Psycholinguistics 19. 53–67.
  • Service, Elisabeth, Marjut Simola, Oili Metsanheimo & Sini Maury. 2002. Bilingual working memory span is affected by language skill. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 14. 383–408.
  • Swets, Benjamin, Timothy Desmet, David Z. Hambrick & Fernanda Ferreira. 2007. The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: A psychometric approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136. 64–81.
  • Thornton, Rosalind, Maryellen C. MacDonald & Mariela Gil. 1999. Pragmatic constraints on the interpretation of complex noun phrases in Spanish and English. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 25. 1347–1365.
  • Tily, Harry, Evelina Fedorenko & Edward Gibson. 2010. The time-course of lexical and structural processes in sentence comprehension. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 63. 910–927.
  • Traxler, Matthew J. 2007. Working memory contributions to relative clause attachment processing: A hierarchical linear modelling analysis. Memory & Cognition 35. 1107–1121.
  • Traxler, Matthew J. 2009. A hierarchical linear modeling analysis of working memory and implicit prosody in the resolution of adjunct attachment ambiguities. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 38. 491–509.
  • Traxler, Matthew J., Martin J. Pickering & Chuck Clifton. 1998. Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 39. 558–592.
  • Ullman, Michael T. 2005. A cognitive neuroscience perspective on second language acquisition: The declarative/procedural model. In C. Sanz (ed.), Mind and context in adult second language acquisition: Methods, theory, and practice, 141–178. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
  • Van Overschelde, James P., Katherine A. Rawson & John Dunlosky. 2004. Category norms: An update and expanded version of the Battig and Montague (1969) norms. Journal of Memory and Language 50. 289–335.
  • Vasishth, Shravan & Heiner Drenhaus. 2011. Locality in German. Dialogue and Discourse 1. 59–82.
  • Vasishth, Shravan & Richard L. Lewis. 2006. Symbolic models of human sentence processing. In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2nd edn., vol. 5, 410–419. Oxford: Elsevier.
  • Walter, Catherine. 2004. Transfer of reading comprehension skills to L2 is linked to mental representations of text and to L2 working memory. Applied Psycholinguistics 25. 315–339.
  • Williams, John. 2006. Incremental interpretation in second language sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9. 71–88.
  • Witzel, Jeffrey, Naoko Witzel & Janet Nicol. 2012. Deeper than shallow: Evidence for structure-based parsing biases in second-language sentence processing. Applied Psycholinguistics 33. 419–456.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.