Filler-gap dependencies and island constraints in second language sentence processing

Second-language (L2) sentence processing may differ from process-ing in a native language in a variety of ways, and it has been argued that one major difference is that L2 learners can only construct shallow representations that lack structural details (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006). The present study challenges this hypothesis by com-paring the extent to which advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English learners and English native speakers make use of the relative clause island constraint in constructing fi ller-gap dependencies. In offl ine accept-ability judgment and online self-paced reading experiments that used stimuli adapted from Traxler and Pickering ( 1996), both the L2 group and the native-speaker control group demonstrated clear ev-idence for application of the relative clause island constraint. These structural representations but also rapidly constrain the active We would like to thank Theres Grüter, Colin Phillips, Bonnie D. Schwartz, the audience at the Second Language Research Forum 2008, and fi ve anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments and discussions. We are grateful to Matt Traxler for sharing his exper-imental materials. We also wish to thank Imogen Davidson White, Sherry Warren, and Analia Gutierrez for their help with this research project as well as Alan Mishler for hi