Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish–L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new–given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers.

传统上，已经有人声称，被动语态的非规范单词顺序使他们固有地比在第一语言（L1）和第二语言（L2）中的规范主动语者更难以理解。但是，越来越多的证据表明，非规范字序在呈现许可其信息结构约束的话语语境时，固有地比规范对应字难处理。在一项眼动实验中，我们研究了信息结构对主动和被动结构的在线处理的影响，以及这种影响在母语为英语和讲英语为母语的人中是否有所不同。与先前的语料研究一致，我们的结果表明，在词序和信息结构之间存在相互作用，根据这种相互作用，被动句在使用新的信息结构模式下的处理成本更高。至关重要的是，我们未能找到证据表明信息结构对理解中的单词顺序约束的影响在单语和第二语言说话者之间有所不同。