Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T05:09:50.243Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The processing of subject–object ambiguities in native and near-native Mexican Spanish*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2012

JILL JEGERSKI
JILL JEGERSKI*
Affiliation:
College of Staten Island, City University of New York
*
Address for correspondence: College of Staten Island-CUNY, Department of World Languages and Literatures, 2S-109, 2800 Victory Boulevard, Staten Island, NY 10314, USAjill.jegerski@csi.cuny.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject–object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish whose native language was a non-null subject language like English. Twenty-three near-native and 33 native readers of Mexican Spanish read sentences like Cuando el escultor acabó/volvió la obra tenía tres metros de altura “When the sculptor finished/came back the piece was three meters in height”. The results suggest that (i) Spanish differs from English for this type of processing and (ii) native and near-native processing can be guided by largely similar principles, at least where lexical information like verb transitivity is concerned.

Keywords

bilingual sentence processingadult language acquisitionsubject–object ambiguitiesMexican Spanishself-paced reading
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 721 - 735
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant 0844035, by a Dissertation Grant from Language Learning journal, and by a Provost's Award for Graduate Research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Second Language Research Forum in 2009. I extend my deepest gratitude to Bill VanPatten for the idea for this project and for superlative guidance and mentorship throughout. I am also very grateful to Marilyn Buck, Caleb Clardy, Clyde “Chico” James, Eileen Locke, and the faculty, staff, and students at the CELE of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City for their invaluable support. Finally, I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Any remaining errors or omissions are my own.

References

Adams, B. C., Clifton, C. Jr., & Mitchell, D. C. (1998). Lexical guidance in sentence processing? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 265–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cedrus Corporation. (1992). SuperLab (Version 4.0.5). San Pedro, CA.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 3–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cuetos, F., & Mitchell, D. C. (1988). Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the Late Closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition, 30, 73–105.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davies, M. (2005). Frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
De Vicenzi, M., & Job, R. (1995). An investigation of late closure: The role of syntax, thematic structure, and pragmatics in initial interpretation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21 (5), 1303–1321.Google Scholar
Delaney, H. D., & Maxwell, S. E. (1981). On using analysis of covariance in repeated measures designs. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 16 (1), 105–123.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6 (4), 291–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frenck-Mestre, C., & Pynte, J. (1997). Syntactic ambiguity resolution while reading in second and native languages. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A, 50 (1), 119–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Instituto Cervantes. (2007). Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera: Nivel Superior (DELE). Madrid, Spain. http://diplomas.cervantes.es/docs/ficheros/200711160001_7_9.pdf (retrieved July 14, 2008).Google Scholar
Jegerski, J., VanPatten, B., & Keating, G. (2009). The processing of ambiguous sentences by Spanish heritage speakers and by Spanish-dominant bilinguals. Ms., College of Staten Island, City University of New York.Google Scholar
Jegerski, J., VanPatten, B., & Keating, G. (2011). Cross-linguistic variation and the acquisition of pronominal reference in L2 Spanish. Second Language Research, 27 (4), 481–507.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Juffs, A. (1998). Some effects of first language argument structure and morphosyntax on second language sentence processing. Second Language Research, 14, 406–424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Juffs, A. (2004). Representation, processing and working memory in a second language. Transactions of the Philological Society, 102 (2), 199–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Juffs, A., & Harrington, M. (1996). Garden path sentences and error data in second language sentence processing. Language Learning, 46, 283–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, A., & Murray, W. S. (1984). Inspection times for words in syntactically ambiguous sentences under three presentation conditions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 10, 833–849.Google Scholar
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H. K., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2007). The language experience and proficiency questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50 (4), 940–967.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mitchell, D. C. (1987). Lexical guidance in human parsing: Locus and processing characteristics. In Coltheart, M. (ed.), Attention and performance XII: The psychology of reading, pp. 601–618. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Montrul, S., & Slabakova, R. (2003). Competence similarities between native and near-native speakers: An investigation of the preterite/imperfect contrast in Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 351–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M., & Van Gompel, R. (2006). Syntactic parsing. In Traxler, M. & Gernsbacher, M. (eds.), The handbook of psycholinguistics, pp. 455–503. San Diego, CA: Elsevier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, L., & Felser, C. (2011). Plausibility and recovery from garden paths in second language sentence processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 32 (2), 299–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivey, M. J., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Syntactic ambiguity resolution in discourse: Modeling the effects of referential context and lexical frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 1521–1543.Google ScholarPubMed
Staub, A. (2007). The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 550–569.Google Scholar
Thomas, M. S. C., Annaz, D., Ansari, D., Serif, G., Jarrold, C., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2009). Using developmental trajectories to understand developmental disorders [Supplemental material]. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52, 336–358. http://www.psyc.bbk.ac.uk/research/DNL/stats/Repeated_Measures_ANCOVA.html (retrieved July 1, 2011).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Traxler, M. J., Pickering, M. J., & Clifton, C. (1998). Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 558–592.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Gompel, R. P. G., & Pickering, M. J. (2001). Lexical guidance in sentence processing: A note on Adams, Clifton, and Mitchell (1998). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 851–857.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Gompel, R. P. G., Pickering, M. J., & Traxler, M. J. (2001). Reanalysis in sentence processing: Evidence against current constraint-based and two-stage models. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 225–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vasishth, S., & Lewis, R. L. (2006). Symbolic models of human sentence processing. In Brown, K. (ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd edn.), pp. 410–419.London: Elsevier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar