Abstract:

In recent years,second language sentence gap processing has attracted more attention in second language acquisition research.The present study investigates the psychological reality of "subject filled-gap effect" during the online reading of sentences that contain "subject filled gap" by two groups of Chinese learners of English and one group of native speakers of English.The results show that the high proficiency group of L2 learners behaved in a similar way as the native speaker group in that both groups adopted the syntactic-gap driven processing strategy and experienced the "subject filled-gap effect";the low proficiency group of L2 learners applied the lexical-semantic driven processing strategy without demonstrating the "subject filled-gap effect".It can be concluded from the results that the L2 learners' parsing mechanism develops towards that of the native speakers of English as their proficiency improves.