Abstract
In two experiments, we examine English monolinguals’ and Spanish-English bilinguals’ ability to predict an upcoming pronoun referent based on the Implicit Causality (IC) bias of the verb. In an eye-tracking experiment, the monolingual data show anticipation of the upcoming referent for NP1-bias verbs. For bilinguals, the same effect is found, showing that bilinguals are not slower than monolinguals at processing the information associated with the IC of the verb. In an off-line experiment, both groups showed knowledge of IC bias information for the verbs used in the eye-tracking experiment. Based on the findings of the two experiments, we show that highly proficient bilinguals have similar online and off-line predictions based on IC verb information than monolingual speakers.
Highlights
Comprehending sentences in a native language involves the integration of information derived from within the sentence itself and from the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which the sentence occurs
In the domain of discourse expectations, we focus on the role of implicit causality (Garvey and Caramazza, 1974) – a feature of interpersonal verbs that denotes causal directionality
We have shown that for the highly proficient and early exposed bilinguals tested in the present study, no processing cost of activating the verb implicit causality information was observed, suggesting that bilinguals can develop similar online and offline prediction as monolingual speakers
Summary
Comprehending sentences in a native language involves the integration of information derived from within the sentence itself and from the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which the sentence occurs. Evidence for prediction has been found in a range of psycholinguistic processing domains with monolinguals (e.g., Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Frazier et al, 2000; Kaiser and Trueswell, 2004; Wicha et al, 2004; Van Berkum et al, 2005; Apel et al, 2007; Manabu and Keller, 2017), but recent findings with second language (L2) speakers suggest that during sentence processing, L2 learners have difficulty with the concurrent integration of multiple types of linguistic information, affecting their ability to make predictions about what may come in a sentence. Prediction during L2 online sentence comprehension at the discourse level – a level at which predictive processing is known to occur
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