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The bilingual language processor: A separate or shared system?
Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Laura Sabourin1, Melanie Knezevic1, Gabrielle Manning2, Shuzhen Wang1, Yubin Xing1; 1U. of Ottawa, 2U. de Montréal
During language use, speakers apply grammatical rules that are represented in an internal language system to convey their message. In bilingualism research, it is debated whether this system is language specific (i.e., a separate grammar for each language) or shared (i.e., one grammar for both languages). Previous research has shown that the answer is not clearly one or the other and that how multiple grammars are represented is likely due to the involvement of various linguistic and environmental factors. Depending on the similarity between languages, a large degree of redundant information in the linguistic system may not be an efficient method of storage. On the other hand, grammatical systems may be shared, which would result in a more efficient storage system resulting in cross-linguistic interference. The debate of shared vs. separate grammars has previously been investigated making use of structural priming in which it has been found that speakers show a tendency to produce or more easily process a sentence that is structurally similar to a previous sentence (e.g., Bock, 1986). Further, cross-linguistic structural priming in second language (L2) speakers has shown that, for languages with identical sentence structures, priming occurs between languages, suggesting a shared system (e.g., Hartsuiker et al., 2004; Loebell & Bock, 2003). It is less clear if priming effects manifest when grammatical structures are similar but not identical across languages (Ahn et al., 2021; van Gompel & Arai, 2018). In our proposed research we aim to investigate the English-French bilingual grammar system of simultaneous bilinguals, sequential bilinguals and L2 learners by testing two linguistic structures (grammatical gender and adverb placement). Specifically, this will allow us to evaluate the bilingual processing of 1) a feature that is present in one language and absent in the other (grammatical gender) and 2) a structure that is similar but not identical in its word order (adverb placement). We aim to discuss our methodological plans and our hypotheses for our electrophysiological data. More specifically, we hope to get feedback about our participant groups and we hope to discuss the ERP components of interest. While our goal is to ultimately compare late bilinguals and L2 learners, we will also discuss what this means for the typical “monolingual” control group.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics