L2 Processing of English Pronouns and Reflexives: Evidence from Eye-movements

Abstract

Seo, Hye-Jin and Shin, Jeong-Ah. 2016. L2 Processing of English Pronouns and Reflexives: Evidence from Eye-movements. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 16-4, 879-901. This study investigated how adult L2 learners process and interpret pronouns and reflexives during reading by using eye tracking measures. In two experiments, the participants read English sentences with pronouns or reflexives in contexts with one coargument antecedent for pronouns or reflexives and with two possible antecedents such as“picture” noun phrases (a picture of her/herself). The results indicated that the learners preferred a short-distance noun as a potential antecedent for reflexives and a long-distance noun as a potential antecedent for pronouns in both contexts. Also, the participants showed similar eye-movement patterns regardless of the type of anaphor (reflexive or pronoun) in Experiment 1, but they exhibited a longer regression path duration for pronoun anaphors than for reflexive anaphors in Experiment 2. These results showed that adult L2 learners were able to interpret pronouns and reflexives in a native-like fashion in both contexts by incorporating syntactic binding principles, although they had more difficulties in interpreting pronouns in contexts which required more integration of syntactic with contextual information than reflexives.