Central themes in sentence processing with an emphasis on L1 and L2 Greek

Despina Papadopoulou
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
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In this study I will explore linguistic and extralinguistic issues that have been shown to affect the way people comprehend sentences in the first (L1) and the second (L2) language. I will discuss fundamental themes related to the architecture and mechanisms underlying L1 and L2 sentence processing by reviewing experimental findings from structural ambiguities and syntactic dependencies. 

More specifically, I will explore factors, such as ambiguity, locality, similarity interference etc., that give rise to comprehension difficulties, and will discuss: (a) how these factors are accommodated in current theoretical models of sentence processing, which adopt either a formal syntactic perspective (see for example Biondo et al., 2022) or a memory-based viewpoint (Lewis et al., 2006 a.o.), and (b) whether these factors differentially affect input processing in L1 and L2 (Clahsen & Felser, 2018; Cunnings, 2017 a.o.).

Additionally, I will investigate the interplay between parsing strategies, employed by the speakers, and extralinguistic factors such as age, executive functions, like working memory and inhibitory control, and metalinguistic awareness. Recent studies show that processing mechanisms are still developing even during puberty (cf. Qi et al., 2020), while the impact of domain-general executive function abilities on sentence processing is not yet fully unveiled (Karavasilis et al., 2023; Pulido & López-Beltrán, 2023). Moreover, metalinguistic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in both adults (Tighe et al., 2019) and children (Deacon et al., 2014). In this study, I will discuss these issues by analyzing adult and child Greek data on the processing of non canonical structures. 

References

Biondo, N., Pagliarini, E., Moscati, V., Rizzi, L., & Belletti, A. (2022). Features matter: The role of number and gender features during the online processing of subject and object-relative clauses in Italian. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 38, 802-820. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2022.2159989

Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2018). Some notes on the shallow structure hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40, 693-706. doi:10.1017/S0272263117000250

Cunnings, I. (2017). Parsing and working memory in bilingual sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 659-678. doi:10.1017/S1366728916000675

Deacon, S. H., Kieffer, M. J., & Laroche, A. (2014). The relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension: Evidence from mediation and longitudinal models. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18, 432–451. doi: 10.1080/10888438.2014.926907

Karavasilis, G., Diakogiorgi, K., & Papadopoulou, D. (2023). The role of working memory in the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences in children with and without developmental language disorder: A literature review. Psychology. The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society, 28(2), 205-222. doi:10.12681/psy_hps.32457

Lewis, R. L., Vasishth, S., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2006) Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 447–454.

Pulido, M. F., & López-Beltrán, P. (2023). When Native Speakers Are Not “Native-Like:” Chunking Ability Predicts (Lack of) Sensitivity to Gender Agreement During Online Processing. Cognitive Science, 47, e13366. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13366

Qi, Z., Love, J., Fisher, C., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2020). Referential context and executive functioning influence children’s resolution of syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46(10), 1922–1947. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000886

Tighe, E. L., Little, C. W., & Arrastia-Chisholm, M. C. et al. (2019). Assessing the direct and indirect effects of metalinguistic awareness to the reading comprehension skills of struggling adult readers. Read Writ, 32, 787–818. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9881-2