Kaltsa Maria, Tsimpli Ianthi M, Marinis Theodoros, Stavrou Melita
Language Development Lab, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki, Greece.
Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK.
Front Psychol. 2016 May 9;7:648. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00648. eCollection 2016.
The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular. We conducted two experiments, an acceptability judgment task with adult monolinguals as a pre-study (Experiment 1) and a self-paced reading task as the main study (Experiment 2) in order to obtain acceptance as well as processing data. Forty adult monolingual speakers of Greek participated in Experiment 1 and a hundred and forty one in Experiment 2. Seventy one children participated in Experiment 2: 30 Albanian-Greek sequential bilingual children and 41 Greek monolingual children aged 10-12 years. The adult data in Experiment 1 establish the difference in acceptability between singular VPs in SV and VS constructions reaffirming our hypothesis. Meanwhile, the adult data in Experiment 2 show that plural verbs accelerate processing regardless of subject position. The child online data show that sequential bilingual children have longer reading times (RTs) compared to the age-matched monolingual control group. However, both child groups follow a similar processing pattern in both pre-verbal and post-verbal constructions showing longer RTs immediately after a singular verb when the subject was pre-verbal indicating a grammaticality effect. In the post-verbal coordinate subject sentences, both child groups showed longer RTs on the first subject following the plural verb due to the temporary number mismatch between the verb and the first subject. This effect was resolved in monolingual children but was still present at the end of the sentence for bilingual children indicating difficulties to reanalyze and integrate information. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that (a) 10-12 year-old sequential bilingual children are sensitive to number agreement in SV coordinate constructions parsing sentences in the same way as monolingual children even though their vocabulary abilities are lower than that of age-matched monolingual peers and (b) bilinguals are slower in processing overall.
本研究考察了希腊语中主谓（SV）数的一致性在位于动词之前和之后的并列主语中的处理情况。希腊语是一种在名词和动词成分上标记形态数的语言。然而，并列主谓一致在希腊语中很特殊，因为它对并列主语的位置很敏感：当位于动词之前时，动词标记为复数形式，而当位于动词之后时，动词可以是单数形式。我们进行了两项实验，一项以成年单语者为对象的可接受性判断任务作为预研究（实验1），以及一项自定步速阅读任务作为主要研究（实验2），以便获取可接受性数据以及处理数据。40名成年希腊语单语者参与了实验1，141名参与了实验2。71名儿童参与了实验2：30名阿尔巴尼亚 - 希腊语顺序双语儿童和41名10至12岁的希腊语单语儿童。实验1中的成年数据证实了我们的假设，即确定了SV和VS结构中单数动词短语在可接受性上的差异。同时，实验2中的成年数据表明，无论主语位置如何，复数动词都会加快处理速度。儿童在线数据显示，与年龄匹配的单语对照组相比，顺序双语儿童的阅读时间更长。然而，两个儿童组在动词前和动词后结构中都遵循相似的处理模式，当主语在动词前时，在单数动词之后立即显示出更长的阅读时间，这表明了一种语法性效应。在动词后并列主语的句子中，由于动词与第一个主语之间暂时的数不匹配，两个儿童组在复数动词之后的第一个主语上都显示出更长的阅读时间。这种效应在单语儿童中得到解决，但在双语儿童的句子结尾仍然存在，这表明他们在重新分析和整合信息方面存在困难。综上所述，这些发现表明：（a）10至12岁的顺序双语儿童在解析SV并列结构中的数一致时与单语儿童的方式相同，尽管他们的词汇能力低于年龄匹配的单语同龄人；（b）双语者在整体处理上较慢。
