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Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners
Edited by Maya Hickmann †, Edy Veneziano and Harriet Jisa
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 22] 2018
► pp. 313–338

Chapter 15
Online sentence processing in simultaneous French/Swedish bilinguals

| Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage, CNRS & Université Paris 8
| Laboratoire Modèles, Dynamique, Corpus, Université Paris Nanterre & CNRS
| Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neuropsychologie Cognitive, CNRS & Université Paris Descartes

Within the Competition Model, cue validity and cue cost can serve to make predictions about real-time sentence processing in a cross-linguistic perspective. Previous research with monolingual children and adults in French (Kail 2004) and Swedish (Kail et al. 2012) proposed that cue cost is determined by contextual and structural information, word order and morphology. On the basis of online grammaticality judgments, we investigated whether these cue cost constraints are equally efficient and follow the same hierarchy in simultaneous French/Swedish bilinguals and in their monolingual counterparts. Although bilinguals were slower and less accurate, the weight of each cue cost component was similar for both groups. Bilinguals’ longer detection times are linked to specific interactions between cue cost components not observed in monolinguals. This result is compatible with the cognitive cost implied by the need to inhibit the non-relevant language during bilingual processing.

Keywords: Competition Model, cue cost, online grammaticality judgment, simultaneous bilinguals, French, Swedish, bilingual processing, detection times
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Sentence processing in the Competition Model
  • 2.Selected characteristics of French and Swedish
    • 2.1Word order
      • French
      • Swedish
    • 2.2Verbal and nominal agreement
      • French
      • Swedish
  • 3.Main factors of cue cost
    • 3.1Violation Position: Early vs. late
    • 3.2Violation Span: Intraphrasal vs. interphrasal
    • 3.3Violation Type: Agreement vs. word order
  • 4.Previous results on cue cost in French and Swedish monolinguals
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Linguistic material
    • 5.3Experimental apparatus
  • 6.Cue cost in simultaneous French /Swedish bilinguals
    • 6.1Are simultaneous bilinguals less efficient than monolinguals?
      • 6.1.1Accuracy of online grammaticality judgments
      • 6.1.2Detection times
    • 6.2Similar patterns of cue cost in bilinguals and monolinguals
      • 6.2.1Contextual information: Violation Position (early vs. late)
        • French
        • Swedish
      • 6.2.2Structural information: Violation Span (intraphrasal vs. interphrasal)
        • French
        • Swedish
      • 6.2.3Violation Type (agreement vs. word order)
        • French
        • Swedish
    • 6.3Interactions of factors specific to bilinguals
      • 6.3.1Interaction of Violation Position and Violation Type in French
      • 6.3.2Interaction of Violation Position and Violation Span in Swedish
    • 6.4Specific cue cost hierarchies in bilinguals
  • 7.Discussion and concluding remarks
    • What global performances tell us about bilinguals
    • Cue cost factors in bilinguals and monolinguals
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.22.16kai
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