Eye-tracking approach allows us to collect and analyze data for a wide range of measures of eye-movements, to relate these to language processing, and to have insight of language processing (Conklin, Pellicer-Sánchez, and Carrol, 2018). The current study aims to investigate how ESL university students process the sentences with complex noun phrases modified by relative clauses. Two types of sentences with complex noun phrases were examined: complex noun phrases modified by relative clauses located in a sentence subject (syntactic-based processing) and those located in a sentence object (semantic-based processing). In total, 32 EFL university students participated in this study. Fixation count, regression rate, first reading time, and total reading time of areas of interest were examined. The eye-tracking results showed that the participants showed significantly higher regression rates on noun 2 than noun 1 in both types of complex noun phrases. In terms of verb selection, however, the results showed contrasting aspects : noun 1(verb 1 selection) preference in syntactic-based processing whereas noun 2(verb 2 selection) preference in semantic-based processing,

Sunyoung Lee. 2017. Online Processing of Dependency between an NPI and Negation in Korean. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 19-36. The present study investigated online processing of syntactic dependency between a negative polarity item (NPI) and its negative licensor in Korean. A total of 32 adult native speakers of Korean participated in the study. The study employed a region-by-region, self-paced reading paradigm to measure online reading times. The results showed that as soon as a parser encountered an NPI in the sentence, it expected a negative element to come up at the earliest potential position. Slow reading times occurred at the first candidate site if such an expectation was not satisfied immediately. The findings of the study support the Filled Gap Effect in English (Fodor 1978; Crain and Fodor 1985; Stowe 1986; Frazier and Clifton 1989) and the Typing Mismatch Effect in Japanese (Miyamoto and Takahashi 2001, 2002); Aoshima et al. 2004; Ueno and Kluender 2010). The results suggest that the human parsers, despite the different structural properties of each language, use the similar sentence processing mechanism.

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.

Chegyong Im. 2003. Processing of Ambiguous Sentences: An Optimality Theoretic Approach. Studies in Modern Grammar 31, 71-88. Our approach claims that the same principles that govern syntactic structures also contribute to a theory of sentence processing. We also argue, following Gibson & Boihier (1998), that the ambiguities can be resolved by the strategy of Optimality Theory i.e., by picking out the most optimal candidate with the rank of the constraints converted from the principles of Minimalist Program. The constrains suggested here are Thematic Valency, Node Conservativity and Node Locality to explain the preference among the ambiguous interpretations as well as Deictic Condition to select the antecedent for the Pros and anaphors.