Things can change: Sentence processing in consecutive translation

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Bilingualism Research

Background:

• Syntactic cues are crucial for assigning thematic roles (agent/patient) in sentence comprehension.
• Bilinguals may adapt their processing strategies based on task requirements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if bilinguals' use of syntactic cues changes depending on whether they are reading within-language or translating.
• To examine the influence of animacy, subject-verb agreement, and word order cues.

Main Methods:

• Spanish (L1)/English (L2) bilinguals performed sentence processing tasks.
• Tasks involved reading sentences in Spanish for either same-language production or English translation.
• Three experiments evaluated different syntactic cues: animacy, subject-verb agreement, and word order.

Main Results:

• Word order proved a stronger cue than animacy or subject-verb agreement during translation.
• When a cue conflicted between languages, bilinguals mirrored L1 Spanish patterns in same-language tasks and L2 English patterns in translation tasks.

Conclusions:

• Sentence processing in bilinguals is modulated by task demands, specifically translation.
• Translation tasks appear to shift bilinguals' reliance on syntactic cues towards their L2 processing patterns.