What Are the Modulators of Cross-Language Syntactic Activation During Natural Reading?

Naomi Vingron,Deanna Friesen,Pauline Palma,Veronica Whitford,Debra Titone,Jason W Gullifer,Debra Jared

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.597701

Naomi Vingron, Deanna Friesen + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.597701

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Abstract

Bilinguals juggle knowledge of multiple languages, including syntactic constructions that can mismatch (e.g., the red car, la voiture rouge; Mary sees it, Mary le voit). We used eye-tracking to examine whether French-English (n = 23) and English-French (n = 21) bilingual adults activate non-target language syntax during English L2 (Experiment 1) and L1 (Experiment 2) reading, and whether this differed from functionally monolingual English reading (Experiment 3, n = 26). People read English sentences containing syntactic constructions that were either partially shared across languages (adjective-noun constructions) or completely unshared (object-pronoun constructions). These constructions were presented in an intact form, or in a violated form that was French-consistent or French-inconsistent. For both L2 and L1 reading, bilinguals read French-consistent adjective-noun violations relatively quickly, suggesting cross-language activation. This did not occur when the same people read object-pronoun constructions manipulated in the same manner. Surprisingly, English readers exposed to French in their lifetime but functionally monolingual, also read French-consistent violations for adjective-noun constructions faster, particularly for some items. However, when we controlled for item differences in the L2 and L1 reading data, cross-language effects observed were similar to the original data pattern. Moreover, individual differences in L2 experience modulated both L2 and L1 reading for adjective-noun constructions, consistent with a cross-language activation interpretation of the data. These findings are consistent with the idea of syntactic cross-language activation during reading for some constructions. However, for several reasons, cross-language syntactic activation during comprehension may be overall more variable and challenging to investigate methodologically compared to past work on other forms of cross-language activation (i.e., single words).

Highlights

What are the modulators of cross-language syntactic activation during natural reading? Bilinguals juggle multiple languages in everyday communication, yet their ability to produce and comprehend usually proceeds fluently (Grosjean, 2001)
The word “chat,” an interlingual homograph, could simultaneously activate the English-French bilinguals reading in their L1 (English) meaning “informal conversation” or the French meaning “cat.” We know from many studies, and leading models of bilingual language processing (e.g., Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002; Dijkstra, et al, 2019), that crosslanguage activation of divergent meanings slows reading for words like “chat.” While much is understood about crosslanguage activation at the single-word level during reading, less clear is whether bilingual adults experience cross-language activation for multiword syntactic constructions during reading and whether this activation is modulated by individual differences among bilinguals
The results of Experiment 1 were consistent with the idea that bilinguals activated L1 (French) adjective-noun word order when reading in their L2 (English) during early stages of sentence processing

Summary

Introduction

What are the modulators of cross-language syntactic activation during natural reading? Bilinguals juggle multiple languages in everyday communication, yet their ability to produce and comprehend usually proceeds fluently (Grosjean, 2001). “My neighbors had a heated chat about the ousted man’s strange Tweets.”. While interpretation of this sentence is Modulators of Cross-Language Syntactic Activation straightforward, there are several places where a French-English bilingual may have difficulty. Many studies reported bidirectional L1-L2 influences that are modulated by individual differences in current L2 exposure, these studies were not focused on syntactic processing per se. It is unclear whether, and to what extent, individual differences in bilingual experience modulate cross-language syntactic activation. Formal linguistic approaches predict minimal individual differences in native language syntactic processing (see Kidd et al, 2018), individual differences have been observed both behaviorally and neurally (e.g., Wells et al, 2009; Street and Dabrowska, 2014; Mahowald and Fedorenko, 2016)

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