Psychological reality of the trace in L2 English sentence processing by Korean learners = Psychological reality of the trace in L2 English sentence processing by Korean learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study tested the psychological reality of a syntactic trace in L2 sentence processing by capitalizing on the finding that sentences are read faster when discourse-given information precedes discourse-new information. In a self-paced reading experiment, 32 Korean learners of English read English indirect wh-questions in which one of the two objects of a double object construction was extracted. The unextracted object was either discourse-new or discourse-given (e.g. I wondered which cookie the woman would give the/a dog). The overall results suggest that the unextracted object was more difficult to read when it was given than new. This finding is interpreted as suggesting that information structure was perceived by the participants based on the surface position of the wh-phrases, not on their trace position.