@mastersthesis {gamage2015syntactic,
	title = {Syntactic Competence and Processing: Constraints on Long-distance A-bar Dependencies in Bilinguals},
	year = {2015},
	school = {University of Washington},
	type = {phd},
	abstract = {This dissertation investigates the syntactic competence and processing of A-bar dependencies by Sinhala native speakers in their L2 English. The specific focus is on wh-dependencies (wh-questions and relative clauses) and topicalization, given that these phenomena are syntactically distinct across the two languages. Presenting novel results from a series of psycholinguistic experiments, the study reevaluates the predictive and explanatory power of two recent hypotheses in generative SLA {\textemdash}the Feature Interpretability Hypothesis (FIH) and the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH){\textemdash} which concern the kind of ultimate attainment possible in post-childhood L2 acquisition, regarding syntactic competence and real-time processing. The first part of the dissertation is a re-evaluation of the FIH, in particular the claim that post-childhood L2 learners fail to develop native-like underlying mental representations for the target language syntax because their access to UG is restricted in the domain of uninterpretable syntactic features. Two experiments (Grammaticality Judgment and Truth-value Judgment tasks) were conducted with thirty-eight Sinhala L1/English L2 speakers and a control group of thirty-one English monolinguals. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that highly proficient L2 speakers are capable of acquiring native-like syntactic competence even in those domains where L2 acquisition involves the mastery of a new uninterpretable feature. The fact that these L2ers have been able to overcome a poverty of the stimulus problem, imposed by both their L1 syntax and L2 input, implies that full access to UG is available in post-childhood L2 acquisition, against the predictions of the FIH. The second part of the dissertation re-evaluates a tenet of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis that in real-time processing of the target language, L2 speakers fail to build full-fledged syntactic representations, but instead over-rely on non-syntactic information (lexical semantics and contextual cues), unlike native speakers of a target language. Our results from two Self-paced Reading experiments with thirty-six bilinguals and thirty-nine monolinguals support the conclusion that advanced L2 learners are capable of building complex native-like syntactic representations during their real-time comprehension of the target language. Thus, the study concludes that neither the FIH nor the SSH can be maintained in the experimental L2 acquisition domain investigated in this dissertation},
	url = {https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/116655},
	author = {Gamage, Sujeewa Hettiarachchi}
}
