Garden Path Sentences and Error Data in Second Language Sentence Processing

Abstract

This article expands on Juffs & Harrington's (1995) investigation of the parsing performance on wh ‐movement sentences by Chinese‐speaking learners of English. We compare the difficulty L2 learners have in parsing subject wh ‐traces in embedded finite and nonfinite clauses with the problems they have in parsing Garden Path (GP) sentences. Using the moving window technique (Just, Carpenter, & Woolley, 1982), 25 Chinese‐speaking learners of English supplied word‐by‐word reading times and grammaticality judgments on a range of wh ‐extraction structures and GP sentences in English. Analysis of the error and accurate judgment data and the word‐by‐word reading profiles supports the hypothesis that L2 learners of English may have a parsing, rather than a competence, deficit in judging grammatical wh ‐extraction.