The Researcher Gave the Subject a Test about Himself: Problems of Ambiguity and Preference in the Investigation of Reflexive Binding

Abstract

There are methodological difficulties in investigating second language (L2) learners' knowledge of reflexive binding, particularly in the case of potentially ambiguous sentences where the learner or native speaker may have a preference for one interpretation over the other. In this paper, we compare two truth‐value judgment tasks, one involving stories and the other pictures. In both tasks, we provided contexts for different interpretations of potentially ambiguous sentences. We tested a variety of sentence types, including monoclausal sentences with subject or object antecedents (ambiguous in English) and biclausal sentences with local or long‐distance antecedents (ambiguous in Japanese). Participants were intermediate‐level Japanese‐speaking and French‐speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL), as well as native speaker controls. The story task yielded a significantly higher proportion of correct acceptances of object antecedents for reflexives, both in the case of ESL learners and native speakers. These results suggest that certain tasks can lead to an underestimation of learners' L2 competence and that one must be cautious in making assumptions about the nature of the interlanguage grammar on the basis of single tasks.