Thanks, Rudy.
On the point
'The French had been schooled to read in Standard French, and probably subliminally
edited out the intrusive qu'. Since they had been conditioned to read only in Standard
French, it would have been difficult to force themselves to try to process the sentences
in a different grammar. This suggests different storage areas for the two varieties.'
I think that's something like it. In my post, I should have said what you say in your first sentence there - and I also should have pointed out that of course people are much less likely to see a double complementiser in print, as Standard French doesn't have them, and most printing in France is done in Standard French. Among varieties of France that do have a double complementiser, very little is printed in anything explicitly acknowledged as a variety of Regional French; and in Norman, there is a reasonably-sized literature, even in print, but most people would probably never come across it. The books it's in tend to have limited print-runs and therefore to be expensive, so there's no reason why someone without a specific interest in Norman would buy them. The reduced likelihood of coming across a double complementiser in print would therefore predispose people not to notice one when they did actually come across one, especially if they were able to make sense of the sentence with only a single complementiser, as they could in my examples.
However, my sentences were presented in randomised order, with no flagging of which were 'supposed to be' Standard French and which Regional French. I'd therefore rather be more theoretically neutral than proposing that my informants' behaviour suggests different storage areas for the two varieties - since informants weren't explicitly asked about how many varieties there were among the sentences. It may well be that they perceived the state of the complementiser in each sentence (single or double) and, on that basis, assigned the sentence to a different part of their language module for processing, but my experiment doesn't give any evidence about that. Something to test in future, perhaps!
Damien
--
Damien Hall
Newcastle University (UK)
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