Differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) comprehension have been debated. This study explores whether a source of potential L1/L2 differences lies in susceptibility to memory-based interference during dependency formation. Interference effects are known to occur in sentences like The key to the cabinets were rusty, where ungrammaticality results from a number mismatch between the sentence subject and verb. Such sentences are sometimes misperceived as grammatical due to the presence of a number-matching “distractor” (“the cabinets”). Interference has been well-examined in a number agreement. However, whether and how forming thematic relations is susceptible to interference remains underexplored in L1 and L2 language comprehension. In six preregistered experiments, we investigated semantic interference in language comprehension and explored whether potential L1/L2 differences can be attributed to different degrees of susceptibility to interference. The results did not show that L2 speakers are more susceptible to interference than L1 speakers. Also, the observed interference patterns were only partially consistent with existing theories of memory retrieval during comprehension. We discuss how these theories may be reconciled with our findings and argue our results suggest that similar processes are involved in L1 and L2 subject-verb dependency formation.

母语 (L1) 和非母语 (L2) 理解之间的差异一直存在争议。本研究探讨了潜在的 L1/L2 差异的根源是否在于依赖形成过程中对基于记忆的干扰的敏感性。众所周知，干扰效应会出现在“ The key to the Cabinet were rusty”这样的句子中，其中句子主语和动词之间的数字不匹配会导致不符合语法。由于存在数字匹配的“干扰项”（“柜子”），此类句子有时会被误解为符合语法。数字协议中已经对干扰进行了详细审查。然而，在母语和二语语言理解中，主题关系的形成是否以及如何容易受到干扰仍有待探索。在六个预先注册的实验中，我们研究了语言理解中的语义干扰，并探讨了潜在的 L1/L2 差异是否可以归因于不同程度的干扰敏感性。结果并未表明 L2 扬声器比 L1 扬声器更容易受到干扰。此外，观察到的干扰模式与理解过程中记忆检索的现有理论仅部分一致。我们讨论了这些理论如何与我们的发现相一致，并认为我们的结果表明 L1 和 L2 主谓依存形成涉及类似的过程。