Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role of Verb Bias on the Processing of Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences in Spanish-English Bilinguals

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Tracy Cramer Scaltz女士将在Paola (Giuli) Dussias博士的指导下为她的博士论文收集数据。本研究将探讨第一语言和第二语言的言语信息如何影响句子理解过程中语法结构的构建方式。最近的心理语言学研究表明，与动词相关的信息在西班牙语和英语之间有所不同。这为研究西班牙-英语双语者是否使用特定于在特定时间点处理的语言的口头信息，或者两种语言之间是否存在跨语言渗透性，例如一种语言中的信息影响另一种语言的处理提供了最佳测试平台。跨语言渗透的概念是相关的，因为有令人信服的证据表明，双语理解涉及同时激活与第一语言和第二语言相关的信息。在词的层面上，在双语人群的词汇决策和词命名任务中发现同源词（在双语者的两种语言中具有相同意义和相似的正字法语音形式的词）的促进效应。在句子层面，当同源词嵌入到句子语境中时，跨语言激活也会持续存在。综上所述，这些发现表明，在第二语言句子加工过程中，母语言语信息对同源词的影响可能比非同源词更明显。克拉默·斯卡尔茨的实验将在两项眼球追踪研究中考察精通西班牙语-英语双语者的表现，以确定同源词和非同源词的口头信息对句子理解过程中遇到的难易程度的影响程度。她还将研究同源词词汇激活的增加是否为双语者在第二语言句子加工中使用第一语言言语信息提供了指导。双语参与者将接受一系列的能力测试，并以第二语言完成一份动词规范问卷，以确定他们对英语口头信息的了解程度。双语者在这些任务中的表现将与单语控制组进行比较。这项研究将为了解说话者如何利用第一和第二语言信息提供新的见解，并为更详细地研究美国和国外的双语社区如何从认识英语和西班牙语之间的异同中获益铺平道路。研究结果将丰富对第二语言学习的基本认识，同时为成人语言学习者的第二语言结构模式教学提供有用的信息。此外，该项目将增加训练有素的语言研究人员的多样性，同时为海外西班牙裔学者和美国学者之间的国际合作创造机会。

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Tracy Cramer Scaltz will collect data for her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Paola (Giuli) Dussias. This research will examine how first and second language verbal information influences the way in which grammatical structure is built during sentence comprehension. Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that information associated with verbs varies between Spanish and English. This provides an optimal testbed to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals use verbal information specific to the language being processed at a particular point in time or whether there is cross-linguistic permeability between the two languages, such that information in one language affects processing in the other language. The idea of cross-linguistic permeability is relevant because there is compelling evidence that bilingual language comprehension involves the simultaneous activation of information related to both the first and second languages. At the word level, a cognate (words with the same meaning and similar orthographic-phonological form in a bilingual's two languages) facilitation effect has been found across lexical decision and word naming tasks with bilingual populations. At the sentential level, cross-language activation also persists when cognates are embedded in sentence contexts. Taken together, these findings suggest that the influence of first language verbal information during second language sentence processing may be more readily evident for cognates than for non-cognates. Ms. Cramer Scaltz's experiments will examine the performance of highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals in two eye-tracking studies to determine the extent to which verbal information of cognates and non-cognates influences the ease or difficulty encountered during sentence comprehension. She will also investigate whether the increased lexical activation that cognates provide guides bilinguals to use first language verbal information during second language sentence processing. Bilingual participants will take a battery of proficiency tests and will complete a verb norming questionnaire in their second language to determine their knowledge of English verbal information. The bilinguals' performance on these tasks will be compared to monolingual controls. This research will provide new insights into how speakers exploit first and second verbal information and will pave the way for more detailed inquiry into how bilingual communities in the US and abroad can profit from recognizing knowledge about the similarities and differences between English and Spanish. The results will enrich the basic understanding of learning a second language, while providing useful information for teaching second language structural patterns to adult language learners. In addition, the project will increase the diversity of the pool of trained language researchers, while establishing opportunities for international collaboration between Hispanic scholars abroad and scholars in the US.