Cele, F. . 1, 2
1 Bogaziçi University
2 Kadir Has University
The effects of first language (L1) transfer have been extensively examined in offline second language (L2) research (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; White, 2003; Lardiere, 2007) and, to a lesser extent in online L2 research (e.g., Juffs, 2005). This study examines L1 influence in the online processing of wh-movement in English by native (n=30) and two L2 groups (L1 Turkish; n=30; L1 Spanish; n=25). Spanish and English have overt wh-movement in wh-questions and obey the subjacency principle, but they differ with respect to the that-trace effect in subject extraction from embedded clauses. In Spanish, it is possible to extract a subject from an embedded clause when there is a trace in the subject position, whereas English does not allow a wh-trace in the same position to follow an overt complementizer. Unlike Spanish and English, Turkish is a wh-in-situ language, where the that-trace effect is not observed. Participants were tested on an online grammaticality judgment task, involving grammatical and ungrammatical wh-extractions presented in full-sentence and moving window conditions.
Results show that Spanish speakers are significantly less accurate (F (2, 82) =30.22; p<.01), (F (4, 328)= 122.27; p<.01) and slower (F(2, 76)=14.80; p<.01); (F(4, 304)=35.03; p<.01) than the native English speakers and Turkish speakers on wh-questions with that-trace violations. The self-paced reading times reveal that the locus of the processing difficulty in this type is the embedded verb following the complementizer. Moreover, analyses of RTs from the error data indicate that the Spanish participants who incorrectly accept this type were faster on the embedded verb than those who correctly accept them.
These findings suggest, unlike Turkish speakers, Spanish speakers’ failure in rejecting ungrammatical wh-extractions with that-trace violations can be due to L1 influence of Spanish which allows subject extractions from embedded clauses in the presence of the complementizer.