Cross-linguistic influence during online sentence processing in bilingual children

Priming Cross-Linguistic Interference in Spanish-English Bilingual Children

While it is a defining fact of bilingualism that bilingual speakers know two languages, the way that those languages are organized in the mind is far from self-evident. Hypotheses about bilingual grammatical architecture range from the claim that there must be two separate grammars, one corresponding to each language (Genesee, Nicoladis, & Paradis, 1995; De Houwer, 2005), to the position that t...

Cross-linguistic differences and their impact on L2 sentence processing

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation,...

Expectations from preceding prosody influence segmentation in online sentence processing.

Previous work examining prosodic cues in online spoken-word recognition has focused primarily on local cues to word identity. However, recent studies have suggested that utterance-level prosodic patterns can also influence the interpretation of subsequent sequences of lexically ambiguous syllables (Dilley, Mattys, & Vinke, Journal of Memory and Language, 63:274-294, 2010; Dilley & McAuley, Jour...

Sentence Processing and Linguistic Structure

Modeling Concept Activation in Working Memory during Online Sentence Processing

There have been several computational alternatives to the cloze task (Taylor, 1953) intended to approximate word predictability effects on eye movements during reading. In this study, we implement a computational model that instantiates each content word in a sentence as an input that activates semantic concepts in working memory. The predictability of a word is then determined by the extent to...