Anaphoric processing of the null pronoun in bilingual Brazilian portuguese-speaking (L1) learners of spanish (L2)

Abstract

Studies on monolingualism and bilingualism have pointed to the fact that morphological information and the establishment of anaphoric co-references impact the establishment of co-referencing. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate anaphoric co-referential processing of the null pronoun (pro)with regards to its disjoined reference in bilingual Brazilian Portuguese-speaking (L1)learners of Spanish (L2) to determine whether the morphological information inherent to the phi features of gender – according to the Feature Strength Hypothesis (Carminati, 2005) – exerts an impact on the establishment of the anaphoric co-reference in both ambiguous and non-ambiguous contexts. A further aim was to determine whether the processing of pro in bilingual speakers is also guided by the syntactic-structural position according to the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (Carminati, 2002). The results of an online self-paced reading experiment revealed that neither morphological information related to the phi features of gender nor syntactic-structural function seem to exert an influence on the anaphoric co-referential processing of proin the group of bilingual speakers analysed, who did not demonstrate in their processual course that they were guided by conforming resolutive mechanisms in line with the Feature Strength Hypothesis or Position of Antecedent Hypothesis.