L2 Processing of Short-distance Wh-movement in Wh-questions: An fMRI Study

L2 Processing of Short-distance Wh-movement in Wh-questions: An fMRI Study

This investigation explores neural processes of nonnative sentence comprehension, focusing on a particular syntactic operation of short-distance syntactic movement. We delineate a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) manipulating this specific syntactic component. English construction i.e., wh-questions known to undergo syntactic movement are presented to native Korean speakers who are proficient in L2 English in a visual comprehension task and compared to carefully matched control sentences. We found that wh-questions as compared with yes/no questions induced activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (or Broca’s area), posterior superior temporal gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus, consistent with a previous study utilizing a native English auditory comprehension task. This finding suggests that increased proficiency results in native-like syntactic processing.