Abstract
Previous studies have focused on the access of content words to investigate the cognitive strategies used in bilingual processing (e.g., Fernández 2003), but less is known about functional words. In this study, I assess (i) whether three groups of bilingual speakers of Spanish (native, heritage, and second language (L2) speakers) access the lexically-encoded information of the quantifier más ‘more’ to activate a comparative structure interpretation, and (ii) what processing strategies are used to resolve a temporary semantic ambiguity that surfaces upon accessing that interpretation. Using a self-paced reading task, three groups of Spanish speakers living in the United States read comparative sentences, which allowed for two possible continuations at the subordinate clause: a subject continuation (e.g., El cantante obtiene más premios que el pianista en el festival ‘The singer gets more awards than the pianist at the festival’) or an object continuation (e.g., El cantante obtiene más premios que críticas en el festival ‘The singer gets more awards than criticism at the festival’). Results revealed longer reading times for the subject comparison compared to the object comparison structures, and no significant differences between the three groups, suggesting that participants in all groups followed similar processing strategies and preferences in the reading of comparative structures.
Highlights
IntroductionPrevious studies on cognitive processing have been conducted to better understand how the parser accesses and uses that lexical information during online comprehension (e.g., Altmann et al 1998; Anisimov et al 2014; Coco and Keller 2015; Demestre and García-Albea 2004; Dussias 2003; Dussias and Scaltz 2008; Dussias and Sagarra 2007; Engelhardt et al 2017; Fernández 2003; Garnsey et al 1997; Havik et al 2009)
Much of the work on lexically-encoded information has focused on exploring the verb (e.g., Bernolet and Hartsuiker 2010; Demestre and García-Albea 2004; Dietrich and Balukas 2012; Ferreira and Schotter 2013; Garnsey et al 1997; Villegas 2014) or nouns (e.g., Dussias 2003; Fernández 2003), fewer studies have investigated whether native and non-native speakers can access and use information encoded on function words during processing (e.g., Dussias et al 2013; Hopp 2013). This distinction between content and functional words is of special interest for psycholinguistic research because previous evidence from the monolingual literature has suggested that function words have a different representation in the brain than content words (e.g., Brown et al 1999) and that they differ in the roles that they play in online sentence processing (e.g., Segalowitz and Lane 2000), raising the question of whether these results found in monolingual speakers can be found in other bilingual groups, such as second language learners and heritage speakers
I investigated whether three groups of speakers of Spanish access lexically-encoded information from functional words that activate the interpretation of a comparative structure and whether, upon accessing that interpretation, participants showed a preference between two competing interpretations based on the case and the theta-role of the first Determiner Phrase1 (DP) at the subordinate clause
Summary
Previous studies on cognitive processing have been conducted to better understand how the parser accesses and uses that lexical information during online comprehension (e.g., Altmann et al 1998; Anisimov et al 2014; Coco and Keller 2015; Demestre and García-Albea 2004; Dussias 2003; Dussias and Scaltz 2008; Dussias and Sagarra 2007; Engelhardt et al 2017; Fernández 2003; Garnsey et al 1997; Havik et al 2009) These studies have suggested that, with enough experience with a language, the linguistic system can extract lexically-encoded information, including the probability of a specific word to be followed by a preferred continuation over several competing possibilities, to anticipate upcoming linguistic information in a sentence (e.g., Altmann 1998). The expectations to use cheese over vegetables is because the structure macaroni and cheese is most likely to appear together than macaroni and vegetables
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