Authors: Boyoung Kim and Grant Goodall
Contact Email(s): boyoung612@gmail.com, ggoodall@ucsd.edu
2 thoughts on “The COMP-trace effect and sentence planning: Evidence from L2”
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Hi Grant, great talk. I had the following questions but was too late: How do your results extend to other L2 speakers ? Is there anything similar to the comp trace effect in Korean ? Would you expect this to work differently depending on L2 speakers’ native languages? Also, there is all the work on the presence of “that” being related to the complexity of the upcoming material. So if you make the complement clause harder (longer, more complex) so that you cannot plan just one sentence unit, do you think the subject extraction penalty will come back for native speakers?
Thanks, Barbara! We don’t predict any special differences for the “subject effect” based on the L1. As long as people have difficulty with cross-clausal planning in their L2 (which I would assume would be true regardless of their L1), then they should show the “subject effect.” Our findings are consistent with this idea, in that both L1 Korean and L1 Spanish speakers show the effect. Their results are different in some ways (and I’m not quite sure how to interpret these differences, to be honest), but they have the “subject effect” in common. Neither Korean nor Spanish has anything that we are aware of that looks like a COMP-trace effect. Spanish, of course, has wh-movement and Korean doesn’t, so I think it’s interesting that two groups’ results are as similar as they are.
As for the possibility of complex complement clauses preventing cross-clausal planning even for L1 speakers and thus causing a general “subject effect” even for them, that’s fascinating. I hadn’t considered that possibility, but it’s worth exploring. Thanks!