Sentence Processing by L2 Learners

This paper presents the results of an experiment which investigated the syntactic parsing strategies used by L2 learners at different stages of acquisition. This represents a shift in emphasis from most studies in the field of language learning which deal almost exclusively with production data. The goal of acquisition studies is to understand both the nature of the linguistic system that a learner has acquired and the processes involved in the acquisition of that system. This linguistic knowledge is generally inferred from the perceptive or productive behavior of the learner. There are several reasons why production has been emphasized over perception in second language acquisition research: 1) Research in this area has been greatly affected by studies on child language acquisition in which traditional perception experiments are inappropriate due to a child's lack of cognitive maturity and verbal abilities. 2) Many perception experiments require a paraphrasing ability beyond that of L2 learners in the early stages of acquisition. 3) Problems involving production are more apparent in most pedagogical encounters and, therefore, are of more immediate concern to researchers. Yet, the investigation of perceptual strategies of L2 learners is important, if only because it affords us the possibility of viewing a different corpus of L2 data, thereby giving us additional insight into the nature of the acquisition process.