Establishing Coreference in Japanese EFL Students Using Verbs’ Implicit Causality: A Sentence Completion Study

Abstract

　　This study explores the extent to which students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) use verbs’ implicit causality (IC) for establishing coreference between pronouns and their antecedents. Forty Japanese university students produced continuations of sentence fragments ending with ambiguous pronouns in English (the second language: L2) and in Japanese (the first language: L1). Verbs’ IC caused referential biases where a pronoun preferentially refers to either the first noun phrase (the NP1 bias; e.g., Ken pleased Bob because he＿＿) or the second noun phrase (the NP2 bias; e.g., Ken respected Bob because he＿＿) in the first clause of the fragment. The results showed that the participants generally produced consistent continuations with the IC biases. However, this sensitivity to the IC biases was reduced in the L2 compared to the L1 condition. Specifically, the participants had larger difficulty using the NP1 bias in L2 than in L1. This difficulty with the NP1 bias was found to result from influences from the participants’ L1 profile as well as their English learning experience. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical models of L2 comprehension.