Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How the properties of a first language (Mandarin, Korean)influence the comprehension of sentences in a secondlanguage (English) was investigated in a series of self-pacedreading time studies. Native Mandarin- and Korean-speakinglearners of English were compared with native Englishspeakers on how they resolved a temporary ambiguity aboutthe relationship between a verb and the noun following it in asentence (e.g., The club members understood [that] thebylaws would be applied to everyone.). Frequency biases ofverbs’ subcategorization structure (direct-object-bias vs.sentential-complement-bias) was manipulated in Experiment1. Results showed that L1-Mandarin learners of L2-Englishwere able to use both the verb bias and the complementizercue, and their usage of these cues was not modulated byproficiency. L1-Mandarin learners’ use of the verb bias cuecontrasts with previously reported findings with L1-Koreanlearners of L2-English, who showed sensitivity to verb biasonly in higher proficiency learners (Lee, Lu, & Garnsey,2013). The difference between L1-Mandarin and L1-Koreanlearners suggests that L1 word order (Mandarin & English,SVO; Korean SOV) influences how quickly L2 learners learnword-order-dependent cues about structures in the L2.Experiment 2 added plausibility manipulation (e.g., The clubmembers understood the bylaws/the pool...). Neither thenative speakers or the L2 groups (L1-Mandarin L2-English &L1-Korean L2-English) used plausibility to disambiguatesentences, challenging the claims that L2 learners rely moreheavily on plausibility than syntactic cues during sentenceprocessing.