Fuchs Zuzanna
Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2022 Sep 30;13:960376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.960376. eCollection 2022.
This paper presents the results of an eyetracking study that uses the Visual World Paradigm to determine whether heritage speakers of Polish can use grammatical gender cues to facilitate lexical retrieval of the subsequent noun during real time processing. Previous work has investigated this question for heritage speakers of Spanish with gender cues located on definite articles, which are highly frequent in Spanish; the results are therefore consistent both with a grammatical account, wherein heritage speakers access abstract syntactic gender features during processing, and a probabilistic account, wherein facilitation is due to transition probabilities between frequently co-occurring elements. In Polish, gender cues appear on adjectives, which are optional and infrequent. Results of the present study show that heritage speakers of Polish can use gender on inflected adjectives to fixate on the target noun faster in trials where that gender cue uniquely identifies the target noun. This finding supports a grammatical rather than probabilistic account of the facilitative use of grammatical gender in this population: heritage speakers are able to access abstract syntactic information in real time to aid word recognition in a target-like manner.
本文展示了一项眼动追踪研究的结果，该研究采用视觉世界范式来确定波兰语传承者在实时处理过程中是否能够利用语法性线索来促进后续名词的词汇检索。先前的研究针对西班牙语传承者探讨了这个问题，其性别线索存在于西班牙语中高频出现的定冠词上；因此，研究结果既符合语法解释，即传承者在处理过程中获取抽象的句法性别特征，也符合概率解释，即促进作用源于频繁共现元素之间的过渡概率。在波兰语中，性别线索出现在形容词上，这些形容词是可选的且不常见。本研究结果表明，在性别线索能唯一识别目标名词的试验中，波兰语传承者能够利用屈折形容词的性别信息更快地注视目标名词。这一发现支持了对该群体中语法性促进作用的语法解释而非概率解释：传承者能够实时获取抽象的句法信息，以类似目标的方式辅助单词识别。
