Usage frequencies of complement-taking verbs in Spanish and English: Data from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish—English bilinguals

Abstract

Studies of sentence comprehension that have employed different methodologies, tasks, and modes of language processing converge on the conclusion that a verb's subcategorization frame and subcategorization frequency influence reading speed and processing difficulty during sentence comprehension (e.g., Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997; Hare, McRae, & Elman, 2003;MacDonald, 1994;MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994a, 1994bTrueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993;. The term subcategorization frame denotes the order and category of the constituentsfor example, noun phrase (NP), prepositional phrase (PP), adverbial phrase (AdvP), complementizer phrase (CP)-co-occurring with particular verbs. Thus, believe can occur in the slots in one of the following subcategorization frames: NP__ NP (John believes the story); NP__CP (John believes that the story was true); NP__ PP (John believes in Mary); or NP__AdvP (John believes so). Subcategorization frequency-also referred to in the psycholinguistic literature as verb bias-refers to a verb's preferential subcategorization frame. In the example above, believe not only subcategorizes for different types of complements, but also appears with each complement with different probabilities. According to some sources (e.g., Gahl, Jurafsky, & Roland, Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world's population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish-English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show...

Reduced Competition Effects and Noisier Representations in a Second Language

“…We expected the L2 participants’ judgments to align more closely with the L1 participants’ judgments at higher levels of proficiency, and we found support for this in the combined analysis. That is, self‐rated proficiency correlated (inversely) with the L2 participants’ judgments on the unconventional sentences, which is consistent with evidence that L2 speakers can become fully proficient in a L2 (Dussias, Marful, Gerfen, & Bajo, ; Foucart, Martin, Moreno, & Costa, ; Havik, Roberts, van Hout, Schreuder, & Haverkort, ; Hopp, ; Rossi, Diaz, Kroll, & Dussias, ). It remains quite possible that sufficient exposure to the relevant competing alternatives would induce more nativelike judgments; the designs in Experiments 4 and 5 provided only single instances of the conventional alternatives.…”

Cognitive control ability mediates prediction costs in monolinguals and bilinguals

“…This pattern of behavior may provide beneficial changes to bilingual speakers’ ability to recruit cognitive control ability during resource-demanding tasks across multiple cognitive domains. Naturally, this transfer of skill would heavily depend on the nature of the bilingualism of the readers being tested, and the impact that bilingual experience itself has had on language processing ability in both the L1 and L2, which can be quite varied (e.g., Dussias, Marful, Bajo, & Gerfen, 2010). In the future, examining bilingual performance in both the L1 and L2, as well as in prediction paradigms in other cognitive domains, may reveal not only the consequences of having experience in negotiating language-related conflict, but also tell us something about how bilingual experience can impact cognition more broadly.…”

Examining the relationship between comprehension and production processes in code-switched language

“…Languages across the world differ in their statistical regularities even when surface structure is similar (e.g., Dussias, Marful, Gerfen, & Bajo Molina, 2010). An open question, then, is how bilingual speakers successfully navigate between two languages within the same sentence.…”