This study investigates the real-time processing of wh-dependencies by
advanced Greek-speaking learners of English using a cross-modal picture priming
task. Participants were asked to respond to different types of picture target
presented either at structurally defined gap positions, or at pre-gap control
positions, while listening to sentences containing indirect-object relative clauses.
Our results indicate that the learners processed the experimental sentences
differently from both adult native speakers of English and monolingual
English-speaking children. Contrary to what has been found for native speakers, the
learners' response pattern was not influenced by individual working memory
differences. Adult second language learners differed from native speakers with a
relatively high reading or listening span in that they did not show any evidence of
structurally based antecedent reactivation at the point of the indirect object gap.
They also differed from low-span native speakers, however, in that they showed
evidence of maintained antecedent activation during the processing of the
experimental sentences. Whereas the localized priming effect observed in the
high-span controls is indicative of trace-based antecedent reactivation in native
sentence processing, the results from the Greek-speaking learners support the
hypothesis that the mental representations built during non-native language
processing lack abstract linguistic structure such as movement traces.
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