Evidence for L2 Syntactic Gap-Processing in Japanese Scrambling Sentences

The ability of second language (L2) learners to use structural information during sentence processing has been questioned by Clahsen and Felser (2006a; 2006b) in their shallow structure hypothesis. They maintain that L2 learners process target language by using semantic information derived from the argument structure of the verb, not by using structural information such as a syntactic gap. The present article offers evidence at odds with that hypothesis by circumventing two problems that have made earlier L2 processing studies inconclusive on whether learners can draw on structural information in processing displaced elements. The self-paced reading study reported below utilized two properties of Japanese, verb-finality and scrambling, and included two learner groups, Korean and Chinese. It found that advanced Korean learners of Japanese are capable of syntactic gap-processing when reading short-scrambling sentences that impose moderate demand on learners’ computational resources. In processing long-scrambling sentences, however, Korean learners did not engage in syntactic gap-processing because of the excessive demand that condition placed on their computational resources.