Colloquium, 11/22 – Laurent Dekydtspotter

A body of research proposes that second language (L2) sentence processing is strongly semantically guided as a result of shallow structures lacking syntactic details in real time (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, b; Felser & Roberts, 2007; Felser, Cunnings, Batterham, & Clahsen, 2012; Felser, Roberts, Gross, & Marinis, 2003; Felser, Sato, & Bertenshaw, 2009; Marinis, Roberts, Felser, & Clahsen, 2005; Papadopoulou & Clahsen, 2003). A second body of research argues for a strong structural reflex (Dekydtspotter & Miller, 2012; Juffs, 2005; Juffs & Harrington, 1995; Hopp, 2006; Williams, Möbius & Kim, 2001; Williams, 2006; inter alia). In this case, working memory capacity, proficiency, lexical access, etc. qualify the manner in which such information is acted upon in the conceptual-intentional and in sensory-motor systems in a L2 (Dekydtspotter & Miller, 2012; Dekydtspotter & Renaud, 2009; Dekydtspotter, Schwartz, & Sprouse, 2006; Hopp, 2012; Miller, 2011; Williams, 2006).

The talk addresses the etiology of L2 sentence processing in a modular system consisting of autonomous components in view of new experimental evidence. The empirical focus is on anaphora under reconstruction as in (1) for instance.

(1) Which story about him(self) did Ben say that Anna told?

New evidence from reading experiments strongly suggests that L2 sentence processing includes an incremental syntactic analysis according to cycles of computations. Specifically, I argue that such L2 parsing follows default structural computations that select specified information and guide aspects of the deployment of semantic processes in real time. Hence, to the extent that minimality, locality and chains supporting binding constitute good-design signatures of language architecture given limited processing resources (Chomsky, 2005; Reuland, 2001, 2011; Rizzi 2013), these design features seem available in L2 sentence processing. A path of research in view of these findings will be charted.