Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the current study, hand motions captured by a mousetracking system were used to index listener’s cognitive processes while making commitments to different choice alternatives during the processing of English passive and active structures. Fifty-seven second language (L2) speakers and 19 first language (L1) speakers of English carried out an aural forced-choice picture identification task comprised of 75 items. The findings indicate that although L1 participants have quicker response times for both active and passive structures than L2 participants, both L1 and L2 participants demonstrate similar difficulties in processing passive constructions.