The Competition Model has served as a functional explanation of cross-linguistic influence and transfer for more than 30 years. A large number of studies have used the Competition Model to frame investigations of sentence processing strategies in different types of bilingual and multilingual speakers. Among the different bilingual speakers…

This study investigates whether cross-linguistic differences affect how adult second language (L2) learners use different types of verb subcategorization information for prediction in real-time sentence comprehension. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested if first language (L1) German and L1 Turkish intermediate-to-advanced learners of L2…

The present study investigates how L2 learners adapt their production preferences following immediate and cumulative experience with a syntactic structure when an L2 structure differs from an L1 structure in terms of verb subcategorization frame and argument structure. Korean learners of English described causative events in English in a…

This study examines the referential context effect on second-language relative clause ambiguity resolution by proficient L1 Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) and investigates whether the ambiguity resolution process is constrained by individuals' working memory capacity (WMC). It presents a self-paced reading study and…

Neurophysiological sentence processing studies are inconsistent about the additional costs that language switching within sentences (i.e., codeswitching) may bring about (cf. Valdes Kroff et al., 2020; Yacovone et al., 2021). There is discussion about whether there are, in fact, additional costs and, if so, about the origins of those costs, since…

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian 'o') in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian - L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence 'This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper'. According to the…

In order to better understand the role of syntactic similarity in a code-switched sentence, the current study explored the effect of similar and different syntactic structures on Chinese-English bilinguals' intra-sentential switching costs. L2 proficiency and switching directions as factors that potentially intervene in bilingual performance were…

This study examined number marking comprehension among Japanese learners of second language (L2) English, whose first language (L1) does not have an obligatory number marking system. The study conducted an online sentence comprehension experiment with 96 L1-Japanese learners and 32 native speakers of English, wherein participants engaged in a…

This study investigates whether statistical learning ability, conceptualized as a cognitive ability to learn regularities implicitly, is a good predictor for L2 learners' online language processing performance. Native-English-speaking adults, as a control group, and native-Korean-speaking adult L2 learners of English participated. They completed:…

The mechanisms underlying native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing have been widely debated. One account of potential L1/L2 differences is that L2 sentence processing underuses syntactic information and relies heavily on semantic and surface cues. Recently, an alternative account has been proposed, which argues that the source of L1/L2…

This study investigates the nature of L2 sentence processing mechanisms by examining whether or to what extent the sensitivity to prosody would affect the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity. The study examines how native speakers of a high attachment language would resolve the attachment ambiguity of their second language which has…

To contribute to a better understanding of first language (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing, this study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and relative clause (RC) attachment preference of Persian learners of English as a foreign language . Additionally, the impact of segmentation of experimental…

Numbers (i.e. 45) are symbols that are common in reading texts in various forms such as dates, percentages, and quantity expressions. Each digit corresponds to a word, unlike words in which each letter represents a phoneme. Despite their high frequency in reading texts, eye movement research on numeral processing is still rare. Numerals are easy…

This dissertation investigates how parametric variation of linguistic properties leads to similarities and differences in language processing across the levels of words, grammatical features, and sentences. For a truly generalizable theory of psycholinguistics, the languages surveyed should not be constrained to English (Garnham, 1994; Norcliffe…

The Topic Hypothesis posits that Chinese language learners progress through a developmental sequence comprising five stages (Gao, 2009; Wang, 2011), which includes the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure at stage 4 and the ba-construct at stage 5. According to this hypothesis, learners typically master the OSV structure before acquiring the…