Ambiguities and anomalies: What can eye-movements and event-related potentials reveal about second language sentence processing?

Second language sentence processing is examined here in light of several monolingual psycholinguistic models of parsing, as well as that of linguistic theories specifically adapted to account for second language acquisition in adult learners. We first examine studies that have primarily recorded eye-movements to trace syntactic processing. Syntactic-ambiguity resolution is used in these studies to address various current models of parsing, both in monolinguals and bilinguals. To illustrate how these models can be tested, we discuss a particular type of structural ambiguity: reduced relative clauses. Thereafter, we focus our attention on studies that have recorded event-related potentials during the processing of spoken and written sentences in bilinguals. In these studies, the accent is placed upon how semantic and syntactic anomalies, rather than ambiguities, are treated. We conclude with a quick comparison of these two approaches