Multiple Sluicing and SWIPING Meet RT-based Experimental Syntax

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper to scrutinize to what extent advanced L2 learners would differ from L1 speakers in the anticipation, integration, and repair of syntactic information during sentence processing. For this purpose, we conducted two on-line self-paced reading experiments for processing multiple Sluicing (or TP ellipsis) with two PP remnants in English by both L1 speakers and L2 learners and found some interesting findings as follows. First, L1 speakers showed an early effect of processing both the first preposition pied-piped and the first SWIPING-ed (or inverted preposition) PP remnant conditions in the same way, pointing to the fact that they anticipated upcoming information (TP ellipsis), whereas the L2 learners did not. The latter result is in line with those in other works showing that L2 learners do not expect upcoming syntactic categories in the same fashion as L1 speakers do. Second, L2 speakers showed a late effect of processing both the first and the second SWIPING-ed PP conditions analogously, implying either an increase in working memory or the use of different repair tactics compared with L1 speakers.