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ERIC Number: EJ777909
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007-Mar
Pages: 16
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1366-7289
EISSN: N/A
The Effect of Exposure on Syntactic Parsing in Spanish-English Bilinguals
Dussias, Paola E.; Sagarra, Nuria
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, v10 n1 p101-116 Mar 2007
An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish-English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish-English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The ambiguity concerned whether a relative clause (RC) that appeared after a complex noun phrase (NP) was interpreted as modifying the first or the second noun in the complex NP ("El policia arresto a la hermana del criado que estaba enferma desde hacia tiempo"). The results showed that whereas the Spanish monolingual speakers and the Spanish-English bilinguals with limited exposure reliably attached the relative clause to the first noun, the Spanish-English bilingual with extensive exposure attached the relative to the second noun. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence parsing most consistent with the findings. [The writing of this paper was supported in part by College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State University.]
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Institutes of Health (DHHS), Bethesda, MD.
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A