The processing of English number agreement by Turkish speakers of English :|an eye-tracking study

Abstract

This study investigates how Turkish learners of English process subject-verb number (S-V) agreement and whether linear or syntactic distance affects processing of S-V agreement in the L2. Two eye-tracking experiments and a pen-and-paper gap-fill task were performed. Experimental sentences were declarative with complex subject NPs made of one head noun (singular - Experiment 1, plural - Experiment 2) and two post-modifying PPs following (Franck et al., 2002; Pearlmutter, 2000). The number feature of the middle and the local noun was manipulated. In Experiment 2, singular nouns were modified by one to make them marked (Eberhard, 1997) and to test the effect of lexical information. The pen-and-paper gap-fill task contained the same experimental sentences as in Experiments 1 and 2 but with gaps in the verb position. Ninety-five advanced Turkish learners of English participated in the study, forty-eight of which took part in Experiment 1 and forty-seven participated in Experiment 2. All participants took a pen-and-paper gap-fill test to ensure their knowledge of S-V agreement after the eye-tracking experiments. The results showed that when there are no lexical cues, Turkish learners of English are sensitive to linear distance, unlike native speakers who were sensitive to syntactic distance (Pearlmutter, 2000) for similar constructions. Given lexical information (i.e., one), they show sensitivity to both linear and syntactic distance, suggesting that L2 speakers can do complex syntactic processing, similar to native speakers, when semantic cues are present (Cunnings, 2017).