Cross-Linguistic Differences at the Syntax-Discourse Interface in Off- and On-line L2 Performance

Studies of ultimate attainment in adult second-language (L2) acquisition report a disjunction between success in acquiring the syntax of the target language (TL), on the one hand, and persistent difficulties at the interfaces of syntax with other grammatical modules, e.g. discourse-pragmatics, on the other. However, there continues to be debate as to whether these difficulties arise from deviance in grammatical representations or from computational limitations in the real-time integration of information across linguistic modules. Addressing these issues, this study compares off-line behaviour and on-line performance at the syntax-discourse interface in L2 German. Word order optionality in German, so-called scrambling, brings together syntactic, morphological and information-structure (IS) information in grammatical licensing and on-line processing. Nineteen L1 English, twenty-two L1 Dutch and twenty L1 Russian advanced to near-native speakers of German were tested on scrambling in an off-line grammaticality judgement task and an on-line self-paced reading task. The results reveal differences among L2 groups according to task (off-line versus on-line) and L1 (English, Dutch, Russian). I argue that the interaction of task and L1 effects calls for a more nuanced conceptualization of non-convergence at the syntactic interfaces at L2 ultimate attainment. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews research on the syntax-discourse interface in near-native L2 acquisition. Section 3 presents German scrambling in terms of grammar and processing. In Section 4, Experiments 1 and 2 are presented. Finally, Section 5 discusses the results and concludes.