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Syntactic Processing of Word Category Information in Spanish-English Bilinguals
Poster C28 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Zoe Yang1, Tamara Y. Swaab1, Matthew Traxler1; 1UC Davis
Existing research in bilingual language processing often focuses on language prediction at the semantic level. However, not enough is known about the nature of syntactic prediction in bilingual language comprehension. During reading, parafoveal word previews can provide native English speakers with crucial information about the syntactic structure of a word, even at the earliest stages of processing. A target word that is preceded by a preview with congruent word category information facilitates reading times, independent from semantic constraints, suggesting that readers can form rapid syntactic predictions about upcoming words (Brothers and Traxler, 2016). In this ongoing project, we used a gaze-contingent boundary technique to investigate whether bilinguals can similarly use word category constraints to form syntactic predictions in a second language as native speakers. Two groups were tested in this eye-tracking study: participants with English as a native language and proficient Spanish-English bilinguals with Spanish as a native language. Both groups read a series of English sentences in which the parafoveal preview showed either a noun or verb that is congruent or incongruent with the word category of the target word. Filler sentences appeared in 50% of the trials. Short comprehension questions occurred following 25% of the sentences. Linear mixed effect models were conducted to examine the probability of skipping the target word as a function of the word category congruency of the preview. Initial results in the bilingual group show an interaction in skip rate, an early measure of reading, between word category (nouns vs. verbs) and preview validity (valid vs. invalid) and no significant effect of preview validity in Spanish-English bilinguals. Further analysis revealed a significant effect of preview validity on first fixation durations, suggesting that although bilinguals are not making predictions of word category information in the earliest reading measure, there may be a delayed effect in subsequent reading times. This study will illuminate the nature of syntactic word category prediction in bilingual language processing.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Reading