First Language Influence on Second Language Offline and Online Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution
We wish to thank Coralie Vincent, Jens Bölte, Pienie Zwitserlood, Sascha Kuck, Julia Kiegelmann, and Anna Thomas for their advice and help when preparing the experiment and collecting data in Münster; Raquel Fernández Fuertes, Esther Álvarez de la Fuente, Sonja Mujcinovic, and the department of Filología Inglesa of the Universidad de Valladolid (Spain) for their help with data collection in Valladolid; the many colleagues who have helped distribute the questionnaires for Experiment 1; and Christine Dimroth and Kara Morgan‐Short for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. This project received financial support from the DAAD and Campus France (PHC PROCOPE 2014‐2015 N° 30767NF) as well as from the Laboratoire d'Excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (ANR‐10‐LABX‐0083).
Abstract
This study examined first language (L1) influence on second language (L2) ambiguous pronoun resolution by investigating (a) whether L1 influence takes place at the level of the pronominal form (form‐dependent influence) and/or at the level of the construction in which the form appears (construction‐dependent influence) and (b) whether effects differ in online compared to offline data. In Experiment 1, we replicated previously observed construction‐dependent crosslinguistic differences between French and German and provided new data for Spanish. In Experiment 2, we assessed offline and online interpretation preferences of intermediate L1 French and L1 Spanish learners of German. Our results provide evidence of form‐dependent L1 influence, in that learners transferred a generalized antecedent bias associated with overt pronouns. Moreover, our results extend previous findings by showing that L1 influence on L2 pronoun resolution can occur during online processing.
Open Practices
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