The Interaction of Morphological Cues in Bilingual Sentence Processing: An Eye-Tracking Study (original) (raw)
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Applied Psycholinguistics, 2007
Although the organization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) lexicosemantic information has been extensively studied in the bilingual literature, little evidence exists concerning how syntactic information associated with words is represented across languages. The present study examines the shared or independent nature of the representation of verb argument structure in the bilingual mental lexicon and the contribution of constituent order and thematic role information in these representations. In three production tasks, Greek (L1) advanced learners of English (L2) generated an L1 prime structure (Experiment 1: prepositional object [PO] and double object [DO] structures; Experiment 2: PO, DO, and intransitive structures; Experiment 3: PO, DO, locative, and “provide (someone) with (something)” structures) before completing an L2 target structure (PO or DO only). Experiment 1 showed L1-to-L2 syntactic priming; participants tended to reuse L1 structure when producing L2 ut...
Processing of Morphological and Semantic Cues in Russian and German
Language and Cognitive Processes, 1999
This study examines the on-line processing of morphological cues to sentence interpretation in Russian and German with the goal of evaluating the relative impacts of cue availability and cue reliability. Both Russian and German use the cues of word order, animacy, case-marking, and subject-verb agreement to identify the agent of active transitive sentences. However, the availability of the case-marking cue is higher in Russian than in German. Using a picture-choice paradigm, we contrasted case-marking and animacy in Russian and German. The reaction times showed larger effects of casemarking in Russian than in German and effects of animacy in German, but not in Russian. These results suggest that the higher the availability of a cue, the larger the processing bene ts associated with the presence of this cue and the smaller the impact of other converging information. A recurrent cascaded backpropagation network was designed to simulate these effects. The network succeeded in capturing the essential language differences in the reaction times, thereby illustrating how the statistical properties of cues in a language can affect the time-course of activation of alternative interpretations during sentence processing.
The construction of subject-verb agreement in sentence production by bilinguals
2006
Experimental research on agreement production has provided compelling evidence that the interference produced by a syntactic element intervening between the subject and its verb (e.g., *The son of the neighbours are absent) is sensitive to the hierarchical position of this attractor (e.g., Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998). Our research extends the construct of hierarchical structure in proposing a finer characterisation of its role in interference. This role is a function of (1) structural intervention conceived of as a necessary condition for interference, (2) the type of structural intervention (precedence versus c-command), and (3) the type of movement involved. We will present a gradient in the strength of attraction emerging from experimental research which supports this approach, and will focus in particular on the evidence suggesting that intermediate traces of movement cause interference. One of the critical experimental comparisons that support this claim involves an object relativ...
Cue validity and sentence interpretation in English, German, and Italian
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal …, 1984
Linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts based on the study of English may prove unreliable as guides to sentence processing in even closely related languages. The present study illustrates this claim in a test of sentence interpretation by German-, Italian-, and English-speaking adults. Subjects were presented with simple transitive sentences in which contrasts of (1) word order, (2) agreement, (3) animacy, and (4) stress were systematically varied. For each sentence, subjects were asked to state which of the two nouns was the actor. The results indicated that Americans relied overwhelming on word order, using a first-noun strategy in NVN and a second-noun strategy in VNN and NNV sentences. Germans relied on both agreement and animacy. Italians showed extreme reliance on agree- ment cues. In both German and Italian, stress played a role in terms of complex interactions with word order and agreement. The findings were interpreted in terms of the "competition model" of Bates and MacWhinney (in H. Winitz (Ed.), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Conference on Native and Foreign Language Acquisition. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1982) in which cue validity is considered to be the primary determinant of cue strength. According to this model, cues are said to be high in validity when they are also high in applicability and reliability.
TRANSFER EFFECTS IN BILINGUAL SENTENCE PROCESSING
2009
This study investigates transfer effects in second language (L2) sentence processing. Although the evidence for such effects is mixed, recent studies have found that during online sentence comprehension, L2 readers are insensitive to certain types of morphological marking that are required in the L2 but not in the first language (L1) (e.g., Jiang 2004b(e.g., Jiang , 2007. The present study tested two other conditions in which L2 readers may show similar interference from their L1: (1) a condition in which the L1 and L2 indicate a grammatical relationship with comparable morphology, but under different rules (i.e., a "similar but different" condition), and (2) a condition in which morphological marking is required in the L1 but not in the L2 (i.e., an "L1+L2-" condition). In a selfpaced reading task, Spanish learners of English (along with comparison groups of English native speakers and Chinese learners of English) were tested on two sentence types designed to assess the influence of these potential sources of interference. One sentence type involved possessive pronouns in order to examine a "similar but different" condition; while the other involved personal and non-personal direct objects in order to examine an "L1+L2-" condition. Overall, Spanish-English bilinguals did not show processing difficulty (i.e. slowdowns in reading times) consistent with interference effects in either of these conditions. However, late Spanish learners of English showed a trend indicating interference effects in the "L1+L2-" condition, or, more specifically, when reading English sentences involving personal direct objects. We interpret these findings to suggest limits, or boundary conditions, on theories of L1-to-L2 transfer in the processing of grammatical morphology during online L2 sentence comprehension. Transfer Effects Arizona Working Papers in SLAT -Vol. 16 2
Usage-based approaches to language, language learning, and multilingualism, 2016
Previous second language acquisition studies have shown that English-speaking learners of Spanish, especially at the beginning and intermediate levels of proficiency, persistently misinterpret O-cliticVS sentences. Due to transfer effects, these learners rely on word order as the most valid cue for agenthood, and, therefore, incorrectly assign the preverbal object clitic the role of agent. In this study we explore whether advanced learners are also prone to such misinterpretation errors, and whether they are able to make use of number agreement morphology to reconfigure their L1 processing strategies. In a self-paced reading study, we manipulated match/mismatch in number agreement between the clitic and the verb: in 50 percent of the target sentences, agreement was not a useful cue for overcoming the word order bias (e.g., Locl-sg estávb-sg mirando la chica, “The girl is looking at him”), whereas in the other 50 percent the clitic and verb mismatched (e.g., Locl-sg estánvb-pl mirando las chicas, “The girls are looking at him”), so that agreement provided a useful cue for arriving at the correct interpretation of the 2 clitic as the patient. Comprehension questions were used to probe participants’ interpretations of the sentences they had read. Results show that even advanced Spanish learners strongly relied on word order when interpreting OclVS sentences. However, learner accuracy improved in the mismatching conditions when the morphological cue indexing agreement mismatch was found on the verb. In addition, participants tended to present longer reading times in the verb region of ClsgVplSpl structures.
Sentence processing : a crosslinguistic perspective
1998
D. Hillert, "From Alexander to Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Crosslinguistic Perspective" K.V. Ahrens, "Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Languages, Tasks, and Timing" P. Li, "Crosslinguistic Variation and Sentence Processing: The Case of Chinese" G. Hatano and K. Kuhara-Kojima, "Comprehension Repair in the Processing of a Short Oral Discourse Involving a Lexically Ambiguous Word" Y. Hirose and A. Inoue, "Ambiguity of Reanalysis in Parsing Complex Sentences in Japanese" T. Sakamoto and M. Walenski, "The Processing of Empty Subjects in English and Japanese" J. Nicol, "The Production of Agreement in English and Japanese: Animacy Effects (Or Lack Thereof)" S. Borsky and L. Shapiro, "Context-Independent Sentence Processing" T.E. Love and D.A. Swinney, "The Influence of Canonical Word Order on Structural Processing" M.I. Stamenov and E. Andonova, "Lexical Access and Coreference Processing in Bulgarian&qu...
Syntactic Processing by Skilled Bilinguals
Language Learning, 1998
Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second language (L2) readers. In our study, 48 L1 (first language) and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, the L1 of the L2 readers: pre-verbal pronominalization (clitics) and the faire+infinitive causative construction. The L2 readers exhibited the same processing as L1 French readers; however, slower (but equally fluent) L2 readers also employed a compensatory processing for sentences with clitics. These results build on previous findings that faster L2 readers are more efficient in their use of lower-level information by demonstrating that they are also more efficient at higher-level syntactic processing. Results are discussed in terms of implications for theories of L2 reading and recent models of cross-language syntactic processing.