International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies ISSN 2028-9324 Vol. 9 No. 4 Dec. 2014, pp. 1830-1856 © 2014 Innovative Space of Scientific Research Journals http://www.ijias.issr-journals.org/ Corresponding Author: Marwa Mekni Toujani 1830 The Effect of Sentential Load, Semantic Relatedness/Unrelatedness, and Sex on Depth of Lexical-Semantic Processing in L1 and L2 reading Marwa Mekni Toujani Higher Institute of Languages, Tunis, Tunisia Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: Three experiments based on the text-change paradigm examined the effect of sentential load, semantic relatedness/unrelatedness, and sex on depth of lexical-semantic processing in L1 and L2 reading. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that there is no significant effect of sentential load on depth of lexical-semantic processing in L1 and L2 reading. On the other hand, they confirmed the existence of a significant effect of semantic relatedness/unrelatedness on depth of lexical-semantic processing in L1 and L2 reading. Experiment 3 consolidated the results obtained from experiment 1 and 2 and revealed that load is neither localized at the embedded verb nor at the adverb phrase positions. Finally, sex proved not to have an effect on depth of lexical-semantic processing in L1 and L2 reading. The present study showed that all embedded relative clauses and not just object-extracted relative clauses decrease deep processing. KEYWORDS: Depth of lexical-semantic processing, shallow, deep, underspecification, sentential load, syntactic complexity, referential load, semantic relatedness/unrelatedness. 1 INTRODUCTION Most linguistic studies on natural language processing (e.g. Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1998; Altmann, 1998; Tanenhaus et al., 1995; Altmann & Steadman, 1988, cited in Ball, Freiman, Rodgers, and Myers, 2010) have argued that language processing in general and syntactic and lexical-semantic processing in particular are complete, fast, and accurate. That’s to say, “syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processing of a word is done while the eyes are fixated on that word or while that word is being heard” (Rayner & Clifton, 2009, p.1). This view is also adopted by most psycholinguists (e.g. Altman, Kamide & Haywood, 2003; Van Berkum et al., 2005; Staub & Clifton, 2006, cited in Demberg, 2011) who “assume that [lexical-semantic processing] generates complete, detailed, and accurate representations of the linguistic input” (Ferreira, Bailey & Ferraro, 2002, p.11). However, Sanford and Sturt (2002) proved that lexical-semantic processing is not always incremental and it is sometimes incomplete. In other words, lexical-semantic processing is not always uniform as some words’ meanings are processed deeper than others are. Consequently, they developed depth of lexical-semantic processing theory. Prior to getting a deep analysis of depth of lexical-semantic processing theory, it is worth mentioning that the notion of depth of processing has appeared in two domains of research which are memory research in the field of cognitive psychology and language comprehension research in psycholinguistics. Wang, Bastisansen, Yang, and Hagoort (2011) affirm that the meaning of depth of processing is not the same in the aforementioned domains. The present paper is concerned with depth of lexical-semantic processing as defined in the psycholinguistic literature. 2 EVIDENCE FOR DEPTH OF LEXICAL-SEMANTIC PROCESSING THEORY There are mainly three types of evidence that do emphasize that lexical-semantic processing is not always deep and that do back the phenomenon of shallow processing. These evidence are findings of other fields such as formal semantics, computational linguistics, and human language understanding. They have proved that words are not always processed in an incremental fashion (Sanford & Sturt, 2002).