Modularity of L2 sentence processing: Prosody, context, and morphology in relative clause ambiguity in English-French interlanguage
Résumé
A body of processing research on relative clause attachment argues that L2 processing is generally insensitive to morphosyntactic information, relying instead on contextual (or lexical) information. These claims were examined by manipulating the use of context on the one hand and morphological information on the other in moving-window experiments administered to native and nonnative speakers of French. Aspects of L2 processing breakdown reveal the complexities of information integration, reflecting relative costs of various distinct morphophonological mappings and interpretations. Crucially, L2 processing appears to be sensitive to formal properties of the sentence itself, which seriously restricts the range of possible explanations for L1-L2 differences.