Does interlanguage grammar project intermediate categories? Evidence of partial representation from one-substitution by Chinese learners of English

This study investigates how prepositional phrases within English noun phrases (e.g., the student of physics from Italy) are represented and processed by advanced Chinese-speaking learners of English (henceforth L2ers). Using grammaticality judgment tasks and self-paced reading tasks, we aim to examine the offline performance and the real-time processing of English NP-internal PPs in relation to the head nouns. To this end, two groups of participants were instructed to provide judgments of testing materials and to respond on-line to experimental stimuli containing the proform one. Results indicate that highly proficient L2ers processed English NP-internal PPs utterly differently from English controls in that they demonstrated almost no sensitivity to the existence of PPs as complements following one, mostly without consciously distinguishing them from PP adjuncts. To account for L2ers’ response patterns, we propose a partial representation hypothesis (PRH), claiming that L2ers tend to disregard intermediate categories containing PP-complements in English NPs, thus only partially representing syntactic constituents of the target language. As a structural explanation, PRH awaits further corroboration and/or falsification from more empirical studies.