Thematic and Plausibility Information and Korean EFL Learners' Processing of Long-distance Wh-questions

The present study investigated whether EFL learners use thematic and plausibility information which have been found to be utilized by English native and advanced ESL readers when processing long distance wh-extraction constructions. Forty Korean EFL learners participated in an acceptability judgment test which was designed to find out whether they show subject/ object asymmetry and plausibility effect, as the evidence of use of thematic and semantic information to process long distance wh-questions. The results of the study showed that 1) learners' judgments were more correct when a wh-word has been extracted from the object position of the embedded clause than it has been extracted from the subject position; 2) semantic plausibility of the uh-word as an object of the main clause verb did not affect the learners' judgments and; 3) syntactic implausibility of the wh-phrase as an object of the main clause verb facilitated advanced learners' judgments. Assuming filler-gap parsing strategy, these results were taken as showing that Korean EFL learners use thematic and argument structure information in processing long distance wh-questions.