Processing Verbal Arguments in a First and Second Language: The Role of Immersion Experience
Open Access
- Author:
- Blattner, Geraldine A
- Graduate Program:
- French
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 21, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Lisa A Reed, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Paola Eulalia Dussias, Committee Member
Judith Fran Kroll, Committee Member
Celeste S Kinginger, Committee Member - Keywords:
- bilingual sentence processing
psycholinguistics - Abstract:
- ABSTRACT Past research examining the processing of structurally ambiguous modifiers, such as adjunct phrases consisting of a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause show that bilingual speakers sometimes resolve this ambiguity when reading in their first language (L1) using parsing strategies from their second language (L2). Years of immersion experience in the L2 has been found to account for this result (Dussias, 2003; Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). The primary goal of the present research was to determine whether the information directing parsing decisions for verbal arguments are as vulnerable to intrusion from the L2 as the factors that affect the parsing of adjuncts. In addition, some current empirical evidence suggests that when L2 learners read sentences in their L2 they are not guided by the same structurally-based principles typically evidenced during monolingual sentence parsing. Therefore, the secondary aim of this research was to assess whether L2 speakers use structure-based parsing principles or lexical-semantic information to process structurally ambiguous arguments in their L2. To address these questions, monolingual English speakers, monolingual French speakers, French-English bilinguals immersed in the L2 environment (English) and English-French bilinguals who lived in a bilingual environment read ambiguous object/subject sentences in English and in French were selected and tested. The results imply that when bilinguals have regular access to only one of their two languages, the dominant language guides the way they process sentences containing object/subject ambiguities and when bilinguals use both their languages on a regular basis, they are able to parse each language following the linguistic constraints of that language. Additionally, the results obtained showed that certain bilinguals appear to parse argument constructions using structure-based principles, whereas others may primarily rely on lexical-semantic information and perform a shallower interpretation of sentences.