Vaughan-Evans Awel, Kuipers Jan Rouke, Thierry Guillaume, Jones Manon W
Bangor University, Gwynedd LL57 2AS, United Kingdom, and.
University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, United Kingdom.
J Neurosci. 2014 Jun 11;34(24):8333-5. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0665-14.2014.
Each human language possesses a set of distinctive syntactic rules. Here, we show that balanced Welsh-English bilinguals reading in English unconsciously apply a morphosyntactic rule that only exists in Welsh. The Welsh soft mutation rule determines whether the initial consonant of a noun changes based on the grammatical context (e.g., the feminine noun cath--"cat" mutates into gath in the phrase y gath--"the cat"). Using event-related brain potentials, we establish that English nouns artificially mutated according to the Welsh mutation rule (e.g., "goncert" instead of "concert") require significantly less processing effort than the same nouns implicitly violating Welsh syntax. Crucially, this effect is found whether or not the mutation affects the same initial consonant in English and Welsh, showing that Welsh syntax is applied to English regardless of phonological overlap between the two languages. Overall, these results demonstrate for the first time that abstract syntactic rules transfer anomalously from one language to the other, even when such rules exist only in one language.
每一种人类语言都有一套独特的句法规则。在此，我们表明，以英语阅读的威尔士语 - 英语平衡双语者会无意识地应用一条仅存在于威尔士语中的形态句法规则。威尔士语的软音突变规则决定名词的首辅音是否会根据语法语境发生变化（例如，阴性名词cath——“猫”在短语y gath——“这只猫”中会变为gath）。利用事件相关脑电位，我们证实，根据威尔士语突变规则人工突变的英语名词（例如，用“goncert”而非“concert”）比那些隐含违反威尔士语句法的相同名词需要显著更少的处理精力。至关重要的是，无论这种突变在英语和威尔士语中是否影响相同的首辅音，都能发现这种效应，这表明威尔士语句法会应用于英语，而不管这两种语言之间的语音重叠情况。总体而言，这些结果首次证明，即使抽象句法规则仅存在于一种语言中，它们也会异常地从一种语言转移到另一种语言。
