Going Native? Yes, If Allowed by Cross-Linguistic Similarity

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• The ability of bilinguals to achieve native-like competence in a second language is debated.
• The Language Distance Hypothesis posits that shared grammatical properties facilitate native-like processing, while divergent properties present difficulties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether early and proficient bilinguals exhibit native-like processing of shared grammatical properties in their second language.
• To examine the role of language distance in achieving native-like syntactic processing.

Main Methods:

• A novel behavioral and Event-Related Potential (ERP) study was conducted.
• Participants included early and proficient bilinguals processing argument structure alternations and subject-verb agreement.
• Comparisons were made with native speakers and previous findings on language pairs with divergent properties.

Main Results:

• Bilinguals demonstrated native-like processing of shared grammatical properties (argument structure, subject-verb agreement) in their second language.
• Behavioral and ERP measures indicated native-like responses to shared grammatical features.
• Performance differed from native speakers when processing divergent grammatical properties in previous studies.

Conclusions:

• Early and proficient bilinguals can achieve native-like competence for shared grammatical properties in a second language.
• Language distance is a critical factor influencing the extent to which bilinguals can attain native-like second language processing.
• Further research on language similarity is essential for understanding bilingual language acquisition.