Rossi Eleonora, Diaz Michele, Kroll Judith F, Dussias Paola E
Department of Psychology and Sociology, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA USA.
Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA USA.
Front Psychol. 2017 Mar 17;8:342. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00342. eCollection 2017.
In two self-paced reading experiments we asked whether late, highly proficient, English-Spanish bilinguals are able to process language-specific morpho-syntactic information in their second language (L2). The processing of Spanish clitic pronouns' word order was tested in two sentential constructions. Experiment 1 showed that English-Spanish bilinguals performed similarly to Spanish-English bilinguals and revealed sensitivity to word order violations for a grammatical structure unique to the L2. Experiment 2 replicated the pattern observed for native speakers in Experiment 1 with a group of monolingual Spanish speakers, demonstrating the stability of processing clitic pronouns in the native language. Taken together, the results show that late bilinguals can process aspects of grammar that are encoded in L2-specific linguistic constructions even when the structure is relatively subtle and not affected for native speakers by the presence of a second language.
在两项自定步速阅读实验中，我们探究了熟练的晚期英-西双语者是否能够处理其第二语言（L2）中特定于该语言的形态句法信息。在两种句子结构中测试了西班牙语附着代词的词序处理情况。实验1表明，英-西双语者的表现与西-英双语者相似，并且对L2中特有的一种语法结构的词序违反情况表现出敏感性。实验2用一组单语西班牙语使用者重复了实验1中以母语者为对象所观察到的模式，证明了处理母语中附着代词的稳定性。综合来看，结果表明，即使这种结构相对细微且母语者不会因第二语言的存在而受到影响，晚期双语者也能够处理L2特定语言结构中编码的语法方面。
