Sensitivity to event structure in passives supports deep processing in L1 and L2

A key question in second language research is whether native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing are fundamentally different. Recent L1 processing research has questioned the long-held assumption that passives are harder to process than actives: passive complexity appears to be determined by event structure (Paolazzi, Grillo, Alexiadou, & Santi, 2019; Paolazzi et al., 2021). We replicate these results with a different method (maze task); only passives of states appear to be more difficult to process than actives, inconsistent with a good-enough account. We also present evidence that L2 learners are capable of recruiting similarly nuanced processing mechanisms in understanding passives. L2 learners display the same interaction of event structure and passivization. Taken together, the results appear inconsistent with shallow processing accounts of both L1 and L2 processing.