We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like “While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily”. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (“laughed”), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (“the baby”) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (“dressed”). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.

中文翻译：

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非母语句子理解中的再分析过程

我们报告了两个离线和两个眼球运动实验，检查在重新分析临时模棱两可的句子期间和之后的非母语 (L2) 句子处理，例如“当玛丽穿衣服时，婴儿开心地笑了”。这样的句子引起对主句动词（“laughed”）的重新分析，因为暂时模棱两可的名词短语（“the baby”）最初可能被错误分析为从句动词（“dressed”）的直接宾语。离线实验表明，与母语 (L1) 说话者相比，L2ers 难以重新分析临时模棱两可的句子，并且最初分配的误解具有更大的持久性。在眼球运动实验中，我们发现 L2ers 完成了与 L1ers 类似的重新分析，但未能完全擦除最初分配的解释的记忆痕迹。