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Recent studies on sentence processing show that late learners of a second or foreign language, those who begin learning after puberty, differ from native speakers (and early L2 learners) as to how they comprehend complex sentences in real time. One construction in which this difference has been discovered is in the processing of non-local dependencies where constituents are displaced, such as in sentences containing wh-dependencies: The nurse who the doctor argued that the rude patient had angered ___ is refusing to work late. This paper presents a brief overview of recent findings investigating this issue. To this end, differences and similarities between L1 and L2 speakers in employing lexical and syntactic information to resolve these types of dependencies are discussed. In particular, the L2 learners appear to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategoriser, without postulating an intermediate gap position. Our result is argued to render support to the hypothesis that L2 learners under-use syntactic information in L2 processing, which causes them difficulty in processing the L2 input in a native-like fashion.
