Processing Coordinate Subject-Verb Agreement in L1 and L2 Greek

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Subject-verb (SV) number agreement is crucial for sentence comprehension.
• Greek exhibits unique SV agreement patterns sensitive to subject position (pre-verbal vs. post-verbal).
• Understanding agreement processing in monolingual and bilingual children informs language acquisition and processing theories.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate subject-verb number agreement processing in Greek with coordinate subjects.
• To compare processing of pre-verbal and post-verbal coordinate subjects in adults and children.
• To examine the impact of sequential bilingualism on syntactic processing in 10-12-year-old children.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Adult acceptability judgment task to assess grammaticality judgments.
• Experiment 2: Self-paced reading task with adults and children (monolingual and Albanian-Greek bilinguals).
• Data collection included acceptability ratings and reading times (RTs) to measure processing efficiency.

Main Results:

• Adults showed faster processing with plural verbs, irrespective of subject position.
• Both child groups exhibited grammaticality effects in pre-verbal constructions.
• Bilingual children displayed longer RTs, particularly in post-verbal constructions, indicating integration difficulties.

Conclusions:

• 10-12-year-old sequential bilingual children demonstrate sensitivity to number agreement in SV coordinate constructions.
• Bilingual children parse sentences similarly to monolingual peers, despite lower vocabulary and slower processing.
• Findings highlight the resilience of syntactic parsing in bilingual development while acknowledging processing load differences.