Cover not available
Part of
Advances in Spanish as a Heritage Language
Edited by Diego Pascual y Cabo
[Studies in Bilingualism 49] 2016
► pp. 81–98

Relative clause attachment preferences in early and late Spanish-English bilinguals

 | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 | Michigan State University
 | San Diego State University
Previous research on the interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses among bilinguals has suggested that a single attachment strategy is employed with both languages and that this preference is determined by language exposure (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). However, most prior studies had targeted late bilinguals, so the present study sought to determine whether exposure is also critical with early bilinguals such as heritage speakers. Twenty-three heritage bilinguals and a comparison group of 21 late Spanish-English bilinguals completed off-line binary choice measures in both languages. The late bilinguals patterned with participants from prior research, showing a similar attachment preference in both of their languages. The heritage bilingual participants, however, exhibited distinct relative clause attachment preferences in each of their languages. Thus, it seems that early bilinguals can be more likely to use language-specific sentence comprehension strategies in each language, despite greater exposure to the majority language, which is more in line with a two-processor model of bilingual sentence comprehension.
Published online: 20 July 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.49.05jeg
References (28)
References
Benmamoun, E., Montrul, S., & Polinsky, M. (2010). White paper: Prolegomena to heritage linguistics. National Heritage Language Resource Center. Retrieved from <[URL]>Google Scholar
Brysbaert, M., & Mitchell, D.C. (1996). Modifier attachment in sentence parsing: Evidence from Dutch. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A, 49(3), 664–695. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. (1999). Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eye-tracking evidence from Spanish and English. Memory & Cognition, 27, 826–833. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cedrus Corporation. (1992). SuperLab (Version 4.0.5). San Pedro, CA.Google Scholar
Costa, A., Maia, M., Fernández, E., & Lourenco-Gomes, M.C. (2006). Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Brazilian and European Portuguese. Poster presented at the 19th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence processing. New York, NY: March 23-25.
Crocker, M. (1999). Mechanisms for sentence processing. In Language Processing, S. Garrod & M.J. Pickering (Eds.). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Cuetos, F., & Mitchell, D.C. (1988). Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the late closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition, 30(1), 73–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuetos, F., Mitchell, D.C., & Corley, M.M.B. (1996). Parsing in different languages. In M. Carreiras, J.E. García-Albea, & N. Sebastián-Gallés (Eds.), Language processing in Spanish (pp. 145–187). Mahwah, NH: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
De Vincenzi, M., & Job, R. (1993). Some observations on the universality of the late-closure strategy. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22(2), 189–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dussias, P. (2003). Syntactic ambiguity resolution in second language learners: Some effects of bilinguality on L1 and L2 processing strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 529–557. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2004). Parsing a first language like a second: The erosion of L1 parsing strategies in Spanish-English bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8, 355–371. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dussias, P., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on parsing in Spanish-English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 101–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, K., Fernández, E., Fodor, J.D., Stenshoel, E., & Vinereanu, M. (1999). Low attachment of relative clauses: New data from Swedish, Norwegian and Romanian. Poster session presented at the 12th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing , New York, NY.
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernández, E. (2002). Relative clause attachment in bilinguals and monolinguals. In R. Heredia & J. Altarriba (Eds.), Bilingual sentence processing (pp. 187–215). Amsterdam: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2005). The prosody produced by Spanish-English bilinguals: A preliminary investigation and implications for sentence processing. Revista da ABRALIN, 4, 109–141.Google Scholar
Fernández, E.M. (2007). How might a rapid serial visual presentation of text affect the prosody projected implicitly during silent reading? Conferências do V Congresso Internacional da Associação Brasiliera de Lingüística, 5, 117–154.Google Scholar
Fodor, J.D. (1998). Learning to parse? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(2), 285–319. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2002). Psycholinguistics cannot escape prosody. In Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference, Aix-en-Provence , France. Retrieved from <[URL]>
Frazier, L. (1987). Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and performance XII: The psychology of reading (pp. 561–586). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (1996). Construal. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jegerski, J., Keating, G.D., & VanPatten, B. (2016). On-line relative clause attachment strategy in heritage speakers of Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism. Advance online publication. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kamide, Y., & Mitchell, D.C. (1997). Relative clause attachment: Nondeterminism in Japanese parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(2), 247–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larson-Hall, J. (2010). A guide to doing statistics in second language research using SPSS. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mackey, A., & Gass, S.M. (2005). Second language research: Methodology and design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H.K., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2007). The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 940–967. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teira, C., & Igoa, J.M. (2007). The prosody-syntax relationship in sentence processing. Anuario de Psicología, 38(1), 45–69.Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Cotter, Beverly T. & Fernanda Ferreira
2024. The relationship between working memory capacity, bilingualism, and ambiguous relative clause attachment. Memory & Cognition 52:7 ► pp. 1530 ff. DOI logo
Chrabaszcz, Anna, Elena Onischik & Olga Dragoy
2022. Sentence comprehension in heritage language: Isomorphism, word order, and language transfer. Second Language Research 38:4 ► pp. 839 ff. DOI logo
Ruíz, Jason Omar & Pedro Macizo
2021. Ambiguous Sentence Processing in Translation. Psicológica Journal 42:2 ► pp. 142 ff. DOI logo
Rothman, Jason, Jorge González Alonso & Eloi Puig-Mayenco
2019. Third Language Acquisition and Linguistic Transfer, DOI logo
Jegerski, Jill
2018. Sentence Processing in Spanish as a Heritage Language: A Self‐Paced Reading Study of Relative Clause Attachment. Language Learning 68:3 ► pp. 598 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.