No abstract

Although bilingual individuals know 2 languages, research suggests that the languages are not separate in the mind. This is especially evident when a bilingual individual switches languages midsentence, indicating that mental representations are, to some degree, overlapping or integrated across the 2 languages. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the nature of this integration during reading to examine whether incremental grammatical predictions generated by Spanish–English bilinguals (Experiment 1, N = 50) and Spanish-as-a-second-language learners (Experiment 2, N = 50) are language-specific or language-independent. As participants in same-language and mixed-language pairs performed a 2-string lexical-decision task, we measured eye fixation times on nouns in grammatical (determiner–noun) and ungrammatical (adverb–noun) contexts. In Experiment 1, bilingual participants read nouns faster following determiners than they read adverbs in both same- and mixed-language pairs, indicating that grammatical predictability in this context is language-independent. Surface-string bigram frequencies are unlikely to account for the results because the grammatical predictability effect was just as large for mixed-language (very low bigram frequency) as same-language (higher bigram frequency) pairs, and the effect was not modulated by the code-switching experience of participants. Experiment 2 found a similar, though nonsignificant, pattern for Spanish-language learners. When the data for Experiments 1 and 2 were combined, the effect of grammaticality did not interact with language congruency, participant group, or language proficiency, suggesting that both bilingual participants and language learners generated language-independent predictions. Our results support a bilingual model in which language-independent syntactic representations are involved in word-by-word, incremental syntactic processing, even within the most basic grammatical constituents.

We present four experiments investigating adaptation to a regional grammatical structure through reading exposure, using both the needs + past participle construction (e.g., The car needs washed) and the double modal construction (e.g. You might could go there). In each experiment, participants read two stories containing informal dialogue. Half of the participants were exposed to one of the regional constructions and half were not. Those readers exposed to the regional constructions adapted, gradually reading the novel constructions faster over 9 to 15 exemplars. The degree to which the exposed group learned the construction was tested in two ways. In the first two experiments, learning was measured by comparing reading times to acceptable and unacceptable variants of the novel constructions. Readers did not learn either the verb tense rule for the needs construction (Experiment 1) or a simple ordering rule for double modal constructions (Experiment 2). Similarly, in Experiments 3 and 4, metalinguistic judgments used to test learning revealed that participants had failed to acquire the regional grammar of either novel construction. These experiments suggest that the adaptation effects reflect learning some general properties of the experimental stimuli, not learning the syntactic constructions themselves.