2020 LLL Featured Talk: "Successful reconstruction of verb gaps"

Abstract

Sentences with Gapping (e.g., Bill ordered coffee, and Jane __ sandwiches) seem incomplete because a verbal element is missing from them. However, they still possess a complete structure and are successfully interpreted by language users. Regarding the real-time processing of Gapping sentences, questions that remain open include how and when their structure and meaning are assigned in real time, both for mature native language (L1) speakers and for second language learners (L2ers). The current study addresses these questions by investigating whether adult L2ers of English can (come to) posit verb gaps and retrieve verb information at the gap site. Forty-two adult L1-Korean L2ers of English and 53 L1-English controls took part. They completed a self-paced reading task that exploited the fact that Gapping sentences can be rendered plausible or implausible by changing the verb (e.g., Bill {ordered/*drank} coffee and Jane sandwiches). Included as a baseline were the VP-ellipsis counterparts (e.g., Bill {ordered/drank} coffee and Jane did too) since these do not exhibit plausibility effects. Participants also completed a proficiency task. The results show that higher-proficiency L2ers, like the L1-English controls, displayed plausibility effects for Gapping but not for VP-ellipsis, thus indicating that they can reconstruct verb information at the gap site during online processing. This finding demonstrates that adult L2ers can come to process English Gapping sentences in a target-like manner.