TY - JOUR A1 - Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol A1 - Gracanin-Yuksek, Martina A1 - Safak, Duygu Fatma A1 - Demir, Orhan A1 - Kirkici, Bilal A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Straight from the horse’s mouth Agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors JF - Linguistic approaches to bilingualism N2 - We investigated the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Turkish-German bilinguals using two tasks. The first task elicited speeded judgments to verb number violations in sentences that contained plural genitive modifiers. We addressed whether these modifiers elicited attraction errors, which have supported the use of a memory retrieval mechanism in monolingual comprehension studies. The second task examined the comprehension of a language-specific constraint of Turkish against plural-marked verbs with overt plural subjects. Bilinguals showed a reduced application of this constraint, as compared to Turkish monolinguals. Critically, both groups showed similar rates of attraction, but the bilingual group accepted ungrammatical sentences more often. We propose that the similarity in attraction rates supports the use of the same retrieval mechanism, but that bilinguals have more problems than monolinguals in the mapping of morphological to abstract agreement features during speeded comprehension, which results in increased acceptability of ungrammatical sentences. KW - agreement attraction KW - bilingualism KW - Turkish Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17019.lag SN - 1879-9264 SN - 1879-9272 VL - 9 IS - 3 SP - 398 EP - 426 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jessen, Anna A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Reanalysing object gaps during non-native sentence processing BT - Evidence from ERPs JF - Second language research N2 - The present study used event related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how native (L1) German-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English process sentences containing filler-gap dependencies such as Bill liked the house (women) that Bob built some ornaments for __ at his workplace. Using an experimental design which allowed us to dissociate filler integration from reanalysis effects, we found that fillers which were implausible as direct objects of the embedded verb (e.g. built the women) elicited similar brain responses (an N400) in L1 and L2 speakers when the verb was encountered. This confirms findings from behavioral and eye-movement studies indicating that both L1 and L2 speakers immediately try to integrate a filler with a potential lexical licensor. L1/L2 differences were observed when subsequent sentence material signaled that the direct-object analysis was in fact incorrect, however. We found reanalysis effects, in the shape of a P600 for sentences containing fillers that were plausible direct objects only for L2 speakers, but not for the L1 group. This supports previous findings suggesting that L2 comprehenders recover from an initially plausible first analysis less easily than L1 speakers. KW - English KW - ERPs KW - filler-gap dependency KW - L2 processing KW - reanalysis Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658317753030 SN - 0267-6583 SN - 1477-0326 VL - 35 IS - 2 SP - 285 EP - 299 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Drummer, Janna-Deborah A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Cataphoric pronoun resolution in native and non-native sentence comprehension JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Encountering a cataphoric pronoun triggers a search for a suitable referent. Previous research indicates that this search is constrained by binding Condition C, which prohibits coreference between a cataphoric pronoun and a referential expression within its c-command domain. We report the results from a series of eye-movement monitoring and questionnaire experiments investigating cataphoric pronoun resolution in German. Given earlier findings suggesting that the application of structure-sensitive constraints on reference resolution may be delayed in non-native language processing, we tested both native and proficient non-native speakers of German. Our results show that cataphoric pronouns trigger an active search in both native and non-native comprehenders. Whilst both participant groups demonstrated awareness of Condition C in an offline task, we found Condition C effects to be restricted to later processing measures during online reading. This indicates that during natural reading, Condition C applies as a relatively late filter on potential coreference assignments. KW - Cataphoric pronouns KW - Reference resolution KW - Condition C KW - Eye-movement monitoring KW - Bilingual processing KW - German Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.04.001 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 101 SP - 97 EP - 113 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Agreement attraction in native and nonnative speakers of German JF - Applied psycholinguistics : psychological and linguistic studies across languages and learners N2 - Second language speakers often struggle to apply grammatical constraints such as subject-verb agreement. One hypothesis for this difficulty is that it results from problems suppressing syntactically unlicensed constituents in working memory. We investigated which properties of these constituents make them more likely to elicit errors: their grammatical distance to the subject head or their linear distance to the verb. We used double modifier constructions (e.g., the smell of the stables of the farmers), where the errors of native speakers are modulated by the linguistic relationships between the nouns in the subject phrase: second plural nouns, which are syntactically and semantically closer to the subject head, elicit more errors than third plural nouns, which are linearly closer to the verb (2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry). In order to dissociate between grammatical and linear distance, we compared embedded and coordinated modifiers, which were linearly identical but differed in grammatical distance. Using an attraction paradigm, we showed that German native speakers and proficient Russian speakers of German exhibited similar attraction rates and that their errors displayed a 2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry, which was more pronounced in embedded than in coordinated constructions. We suggest that both native and second language learners prioritize linguistic structure over linear distance in their agreement computations. KW - agreement attraction KW - German KW - linear distance KW - Russian Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716417000601 SN - 0142-7164 SN - 1469-1817 VL - 39 IS - 3 SP - 619 EP - 647 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER -