EYE-TRACKING AND SELF-PACED READING: Evaluation of experimental technologies in investigating the processing of relative clause sentence structures by Japanese L2 learners of English

Previous research on second language (L2) acquisition has revealed that speakers of head-final languages struggle to process sentences with relative clauses in English. However, little is known about whether this is due to syntactic and/or semantic factors. In this chapter, we compare the results from an eye-tracking experiment with those from a more traditional self-paced reading experiment. We argue that eye-tracking is more successful in capturing qualitative differences in the processing of relative clause sentences between first language (L1) and L2. In the reported experiments, we investigate the processing differences between L1 speakers of English and Japanese L2 learners of English in reading different types of relative clause sentences using an eye-tracking technique. We show that (a) both L1 speakers and L2 learners experience processing costs when there is no overt lexical head in the matrix sentence and that Object Relative Clauses (ORCs) are more difficult to process than Subject Relative Clauses (SRCs); (b) processing costs with sentences without an overt lexical head are observed in the first stage of structural analysis with L1 speakers, whereas difficulty emerges in the structural reanalysis process with L2 learners; and (c) the processing difficulty L1 speakers initially experience with the ORCs does not persist, whereas this difficulty does for the L2 learners.