TY  - JOUR
A1  - Boxell, Oliver
A1  - Felser, Claudia
A1  - Cunnings, Ian
T1  - Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing
JF  - Linguistic approaches to bilingualism
N2  - We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers’ real-time processing of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), a type of verb phrase ellipsis in which the ellipsis gap forms part of its own antecedent. The resulting interpretation problem is traditionally thought to be solved by quantifier raising, a covert scope-shifting operation that serves to remove the gap from within its antecedent. Our L2 group comprised advanced, native German-speaking L2 learners of English. The analysis of the eye-movement data showed that both L1 and L2 English speakers tried to recover the missing verb phrase after encountering the gap. Only the native speakers showed evidence of ellipsis resolution being affected by quantification, however. No effects of quantification following gap detection were found in the L2 group, by contrast, indicating that recovery of the elided material was accomplished independently from the object’s quantificational status in this group.
KW  - L2 processing
KW  - eye-movement monitoring
KW  - antecedent contained deletion
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15006.box
SN  - 1879-9264
SN  - 1879-9272
VL  - 7
IS  - 5
SP  - 554
EP  - 582
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  -