Late Bilinguals Are Sensitive to Unique Aspects of Second Language Processing: Evidence from Clitic Pronouns Word-Order.

Eleonora Rossi,Paola E Dussias,Judith F Kroll,Michele Diaz

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00342

Abstract

In two self-paced reading experiments we asked whether late, highly proficient, English–Spanish bilinguals are able to process language-specific morpho-syntactic information in their second language (L2). The processing of Spanish clitic pronouns’ word order was tested in two sentential constructions. Experiment 1 showed that English–Spanish bilinguals performed similarly to Spanish–English bilinguals and revealed sensitivity to word order violations for a grammatical structure unique to the L2. Experiment 2 replicated the pattern observed for native speakers in Experiment 1 with a group of monolingual Spanish speakers, demonstrating the stability of processing clitic pronouns in the native language. Taken together, the results show that late bilinguals can process aspects of grammar that are encoded in L2-specific linguistic constructions even when the structure is relatively subtle and not affected for native speakers by the presence of a second language.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Because clitic pronouns are a grammatical structure that is unique to Spanish, the L2 for the late English–Spanish bilinguals in this study, the findings support the view that adult L2 learners who are sufficiently proficient show sensitivity to grammatical structures that are not present in their native L1
These results extend the results of Rossi et al (2014) and Rossi and Prystauka on sensitivity to gender and number features marked on clitic pronouns, but which did not test sensitivity to clitic word order

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The observation that highly proficient late bilinguals can achieve native-like performance does not necessarily mean that they rely on the same processing strategies as native speakers, especially for those structures that may impose language-specific constraints (e.g., Clahsen and Felser, 2006). To examine this issue, we investigated the ability of proficient, but late, English–Spanish bilinguals in processing clitic pronouns, a grammatical structure that is present in Spanish, the L2, but not in English, the L1. Clitic pronouns have been shown to be a taxing structure for native speakers acquiring their L1 (Pérez-Leroux et al, 2011), a vulnerable structure for agrammatic speakers (Rossi, 2013), and a complex grammatical structure to acquire for L2 learners whose L1 does not represent it (e.g., Grüter, 2006; Santoro, 2007; Grüter and Crago, 2012; Coughlin and Tremblay, 2013; Rossi et al, 2014)

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