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Sentence matching and processing in L2 development

The processing strategies described in Clahsen (1984) to explain the develop ment of German word order make predictions that can be tested ex perimentally. Clahsen's Initialization/Finalization Strategy (IFS) in particular predicts that uninverted, ADV-SVO sentences will exact less cost in terms of processing than inverted, ADV-VSO sentences, even though inverted sent ences are grammatical in the target language and uninverted sentences are ungrammatical. The experimental means employed to test this prediction is the Sentence Matching (SM) procedure described originally in Freedman and Forster (1985). In the SM procedure, response times are elicited for particular types of sentences by measuring the time (in msec.) it takes for subjects to determine whether two sentences presented by computer are identical or different. The results of one of the experiments reported here show that inverted sentences result in significantly shorter response times than uninverted sentences for non-native speakers. This finding directly contradicts the IFS-derived prediction. However, further experimental work reported here indicates that native speakers do not respond at all to the inverted-uninverted contrast. The rest of the article thus seeks to explain this somewhat surprising finding. The proposed explanation also suggests that natives and non-natives may process sentences in the SM task in rather different ways.