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Individual differences modulate sensitivity to implicit causality bias in both native and nonnative processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2022

Tingting Wang Open the ORCID record for Tingting Wang [Opens in a new window]  and
Alison Gabriele
Tingting Wang*
Affiliation:
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA Second Language Acquisition Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, Dole Human Development Center, Lawrence, KS, USA
Alison Gabriele
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA Second Language Acquisition Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, Dole Human Development Center, Lawrence, KS, USA
*
*Corresponding author: Email: tingtingwang@ku.edu
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Abstract

The question of whether L2 learners can use discourse cues online during pronoun resolution remains debated in the field. We examine one factor that has been argued to impact pronoun resolution in native speakers, implicit causality (IC) bias, a property related to certain verbs in which one of verb’s arguments are considered to be the cause of an action. We investigate whether individual differences modulate sensitivity to IC bias in both native English speakers and Chinese-speaking learners of English, examining whether variability is similarly explained in the two populations. Results from a sentence completion task and a self-paced reading (SPR) task show similar sensitivity to IC bias in both groups; reading times on the SPR task were also modulated by working memory and vocabulary knowledge. The findings suggest that L2 learners are successful in using discourse-level cues during processing and that variability is qualitatively similar in both learners and natives.

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Research Article
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , September 2023 , pp. 853 - 881
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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