SIMILARITY-BASED INTERFERENCE EFFECTS IN REFLEXIVE PROCESSING BY BRAZILIAN SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AS L2

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate how Brazilian speakers of English as L2 process anaphors in English, seeking to find out if these subjects are guided by syntax from the initial processing moment, or if they make use of information of other sources, especially semantic-lexical, to identify the possible antecedent of the anaphor. For this, we conducted a self-paced reading experiment, which showed differences between intermediate and advanced proficiency level subjects. In the first group, there was a facilitation of reading when the gender cues of both antecedents matched the gender cue of the anaphora. For the advanced group, the results indicated that the processing is facilitated when at least one of the antecedents matches the gender cue of the anaphor. These results are consistent with L2 processing models that advocate incomplete access to syntax, prioritizing the use of semantic-lexical and pragmatic information for anaphoric resolution (CLAHSEN & FELSER, 2006, 2017). In addition, although it does not fit perfectly into any similarity-based interference model, the results are indicative of proposals that address retrieval interference in working memory.

Keywords
Similarity-based interference; Anaphoric processing; Bilingualism; Retrieval interference