This paper investigates the temporal neural dynamics of the semantic processing of quantifier constructions in bilinguals. Sentence comprehension has been debated with different views, and we conducted an event-related potential(ERP) study to examine the hypothesis that sentence comprehension is done in an incremental manner, as suggested with quantifier constructions in Urbach & Kutas (2010). The experiment was done with Korean L2 speakers of English in a between-group design depending on the proficiency level. The experimental results show that the meaning-related ERP component (N400), which was observed in L1 speakers, was not significantly observed in either proficiency group. Given the different processing pattern observed, the results suggest that the immediate, incremental interpretation view is hard to be maintained in L2 processing, at least not in the same manner as L1.
Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Processing of Semantic Interpretation
3. Interpretation of Quantifier Constructions
4. Experiment
5. Discussion
6. Conclusion
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