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Bilinguals on the garden-path: Individual differences in syntactic ambiguity resolution.
Trevor Brothers1, Liv J Hoversten2, Matthew J Traxler3
1Tufts University, Department of Psychology, Center for Mind and Brain.
Bilingualism (Cambridge, England)
|June 7, 2022
Summary
Native and bilingual English speakers process sentences similarly, but native speakers better use verb information. Language experience and executive function enhance sensitivity to verb cues in syntactic parsing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Bilingualism Research
Background:
- Syntactic parsing is crucial for sentence interpretation.
- The extent of non-native speakers' native-like grammatical knowledge during online comprehension remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate how Chinese-English bilinguals and native English speakers process syntactic information during reading.
- Examine the influence of language experience, working memory, and executive function on online sentence parsing.
Main Methods:
- Eye-tracking study comparing bilinguals and monolinguals reading sentences with object-subject ambiguities.
- Measurement of English language experience, working memory capacity, and executive function.
Main Results:
- Both groups showed similar garden-path effects during syntactic reanalysis.
- Native English speakers exhibited a more robust response to verb subcategorization cues.
- Increased language experience and executive function correlated with greater sensitivity to verb subcategorization cues.
- Working memory capacity did not significantly influence parsing.
Conclusions:
- Findings align with exposure-based accounts of bilingual sentence processing.
- A link exists between syntactic processing and domain-general cognitive control.
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