Effects of pronominal reference on the integration of syntactic and semantic information in second language processing

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of pronominal reference on the integration of syntactic and semantic information in second language (L2) processing. We conducted a self-paced reading task involving 60 adult Korean-speaking learners of English and 44 native English speakers. The experiment manipulated the semantic congruity between a subject and its adjectival predicate, as well as the reference type (pronoun vs. full noun) within the intervening relative clause. The results showed that the native speaker group consistently displayed sensitivity to the incongruity between the subject and the predicate, regardless of the reference type. Similarly, the nonnative speakers exhibited sensitivity to the mismatch in the critical region. However, this effect did not persist in subsequent regions including the spill-over and wrap-up regions. Instead, in the wrap-up region, the L2 learners’ processing patterns were affected by the reference type, with sensitivity exclusively observed in the pronoun condition. The L2 learners’ processing pattern remained consistent across varying levels of English proficiency. These findings provide insights into the role of pronominal reference in L2 sentence processing.