Garden path sentences and error data in second language sentence processing

This article expands on Juffs & Harrington's (1995) investigation of the parsing performance on wh-movement sentences by Chinese-speaking learners of English. We compare the difficulty L2 learners have in parsing subject wh-traces in embedded finite and nonfinite clauses with the problems they have in parsing Garden Path (GP) sentences. Using the moving window technique (Just, Carpenter, & Woolley, 1982), 25 Chinese-speaking learners of English supplied word-by-word reading times and grammaticality judgments on a range of wh-extraction structures and GP sentences in English. Analysis of the error and accurate judgment data and the word-by-word reading profiles supports the hypothesis that L2 learners of English may have a parsing, rather than a competence, deficit in judging grammatical wh-extraction.