Abstract:

The question that there were quantitive or qualitative differences between L2 (second language) and L1 (first language) syntactic processing has been the focus of language processing research during the last decades. Studies showed that there were some important factors for L2 syntactic processing, such as the age of acquisition, proficiency, working memory, type of learning. And models on L2 syntactic processing mainly included the shallow structure hypothesis、the D/P model and the united competition model. Future researches would focus on the followed questions, such as the interaction between L2 proficiency and the age of acquisition of L2 in L2 syntactic processing, as well as the children’s ability to process L2 syntactic.

Key words: L2 syntactic processing, age of acquisition, shallow structure hypothesis, D/P model, united competition model