Processing reflexives through syntax or pragmatics? Investigating second language English

This article investigates the second language processing of the reflexive himself by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean learners of English. In these East Asian languages, anaphoric resolution is pragmatic in nature, whist in English, it is syntactic. This allows insight into pragmatic transfer regarding the processing and interpretation of himself within a syntactic anaphoric system, where long-distance binding is allowed in the learners’ first language, but not in English. The main hypothesis is that pragmatic and syntactic resolution strategies clash in the learner's second language English. Context is manipulated to affect the learners’ processing and judgement of himself to bias antecedence to an ungrammatical long-distance antecedent in a self-paced reading experiment. Results show that these contextual effects do not initially influence the processing of the reflexive. However, the offline judgement data reveals contextual effects in learners when making an explicit antecedent judgement—biasing increases the selection of the long-distance antecedent. In all, the data suggests that learners continue to use pragmatic strategies to resolve antecedence in their L2 English, and have yet to transition to English-specific syntactic antecedence resolution.