Abstract
This study aims to investigate L2-to-L1 cross-linguistic influence on bilinguals’ representation and processing with three psycholinguistics tasks. The interest in this type of effect lies in its possible association with cognitive control development. Our study focuses on possible influences of the non-dominant language on the dominant language: we analyzed whether highly proficient Brazilian Portuguese-English late bilinguals immersed in the L1 context behaved differently from Brazilian Portuguese monolinguals in regards to sentences in the L1 that simulated an L2-specific construction (true resultative). We conducted a maze task in order to analyze the speakers’ linguistic processing and a speeded acceptability judgment task in order to analyze their linguistic representation. We also observed participants’ behavior towards a construction available in both languages (depictive). The overall results indicate that bilinguals processed both constructions faster than monolinguals, but the difference between the groups was significantly larger towards the true resultative construction. However, there was no significant difference between the groups in relation to how they perceived the acceptability of both constructions. We interpret the results as evidence that the L2 influence on the L1 occurs during real time sentence processing, but it does not result in changes in the overall L1 representation.
Highlights
Second language research is a discipline in which debates and controversies abound
How bilinguals of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and English respond to sentences whose surface structure would link to an argument realization construction not present in their L1, but productive in their L2: the English true resultative construction
This study aimed at analyzing possible bilingualism effects from the non-dominant L2 on the dominant L1 in both linguistic processing and linguistic representation
Summary
Second language research is a discipline in which debates and controversies abound. it is probably consensual for this research community that the linguistic representations and the language processing routines of the languages spoken by bilinguals and multilinguals interact. Present-day second-language research strives to propose and test models that seek to account for crosslinguistic effects on bilingual language representation and processing Such models include perspectives that attempt to accommodate second-language acquisition and bilingualism within overarching architectures of linguistic competence (Sharwood, Smith & Truscott, 2014; Amaral & Roeper, 2014). They include models that challenge assumptions of essentially distinct mechanisms for first- and second-language acquisition, emphasizing that usage-driven language entrenchment and cross-linguistic competition are at the core of attainment variability in successive language acquisition (MacWhinney, 2012; Li, 2015). What these proposals have in common is their incompatibility with any view of a second or subsequent language as isolated from the overall linguistic cognition and memory repositories of individuals
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