The primary goal of this thesis was to test the validity of the Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) Hypothesis on the acquisition of island constraints by Turkish learners of English. The FTFA Hypothesis claims that L2ers have access to UG even at the initial state, which is assumed to be the final state of L1, and there is a gradual restructuring of L2 grammar. The second goal was to investigate whether Turkish learners of English employ the same parsing strategies in bi-clausal wh-questions. If so, the results would support the Continuity Hypothesis arguing that Universal Parser is available in SLA. Four experiments were conducted in this study. The first two experiments were devised to shed light on the acquisition and processing of island constraints. Two experimental groups (30 intermediate and 30 advanced learners of English) and a control group (30 native speakers of English) were employed for these tests. The third and fourth experiments were administered to display whether there were similarities between the way native speakers of Turkish and English resolve ambiguities and whether island constraints were operative in Turkish. 30 native speakers of Turkish participated in these experiments. The results showed that different processing strategies for the resolution of ambiguities were employed in English and Turkish and island constraints were not operative in Turkish. Besides, Turkish learners of English had access to UG and there was a developmental pattern for the restructuring of L2 grammar. Furthermore, a gradual approximation to the native speakers&rsquo / parsing strategies was observed.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-07-21T13:47:59Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 1030830 bytes, checksum: affa607bacbace5e6fc95c51c5a74efe (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-21T13:48:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 1030830 bytes, checksum: affa607bacbace5e6fc95c51c5a74efe (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-25 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The present study has aims to investigate the intrasentencial coreference processing, observing how the processing of coreference of pronouns and repeated names occurs in relation to the focus of their antecedents. We take as initial hypothesis that repeated names take an extra cost to be processed than pronouns, despite the antecedent is more salient or not. This is nominated by the Repeated Name Penalty, postulated by the Informational Load Hypothesis. Almor (1999, 2000). We performed two online self-paced reading, through Psyscope program. The dependent variable of the two experiments was the reading time of the critical segment (repeated name or pronoun) and the independent variables were the type of resumption (pronoun or repeated name) and the position of the antecedent (focused or unfocused) . The difference between the two experiments was that at the first we controlled all experimental sentences to contain pronouns and repeated names in the same position and syntactic function of its background, so in parallel . The second was controlled in order not to contain the conditions in parallel. 28 students from UFPB participated in each experiment. The results of the first experiment show a lower reading time for the pronouns in relation to repeated names regardless if its antecedent was focused or not .The structural focus showed no significant effect on any of the experimental conditions. A possible explanation would be that the effect of structural parallelism overlapped the effect of focus. That's what the results of the second experiment showed. The resumption and antecedent not in parallel time resulted in an significant effect of structural focus. The reading time was faster when the antecedent was focused than when it was not. It was also confirmed Repeated Name Penalty also in this second experiment. / O presente estudo tem como objeto de investigação o processamento correferencial intersentencial, procurando observar como se dá o processamento da correferência de pronomes e de nomes repetidos em relação ao foco dos seus respectivos antecedentes. Tomamos como hipótese inicial que nomes repetidos teriam o processamento mais custoso do que os pronomes, independente da saliência do antecedente. Ou seja, haveria Penalidade do Nome Repetido, postulada pela Hipótese da Carga Informacional de Almor (1999; 2000). Para isso, realizamos dois experimentos com uma tarefa on-line de leitura automonitorada (self-paced reading), por meio do programa Psyscope. A variável dependente dos dois experimentos foi o tempo de leitura do segmento crítico (nome repetido ou pronome). E as variáveis independentes foram: o tipo de retomada (pronome ou nome repetido) e a posição do antecedente (focalizado ou não focalizado). A diferença entre os dois experimentos foi que no primeiro controlamos para que em todas as frases experimentais contivessem pronomes e nomes repetidos na mesma posição e função sintática de seus antecedentes, ou seja, em paralelo. Já no segundo controlamos para que em nenhuma das condições tivessem antecedente e retomada em paralelo. O total de participantes voluntários foi de 28 estudantes da UFPB em cada experimento. Os resultados do primeiro experimento mostram menor tempo de leitura para os pronomes em relação aos nomes repetidos independentemente se o seu antecedente estivesse focalizado ou não. Já o foco estrutural não mostrou efeito significativo em nenhuma das condições experimentais. Uma possível explicação seria a de que o efeito do paralelismo estrutural se sobrepôs ao efeito do foco. Foi o que os resultados do segundo experimento demonstraram. Dessa vez, com retomada e antecedente não paralelo, o efeito de foco estrutural se mostrou significativo, ou seja, a leitura foi mais rápida quando o antecedente estava focalizado do que quando não estava. E foi confirmada Penalidade do Nome Repetido também nesse segundo experimento.