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。这项研究将研究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，西班牙语和英语中与动词相关的信息有所不同。这提供了一个最佳的测试平台来调查西班牙语-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，使得一种语言的信息影响另一种语言的处理。跨语言渗透性的想法是相关的，因为有令人信服的证据表明双语语言理解涉及与第一语言和第二语言相关的信息的同时激活。在单词层面，在双语人群的词汇决策和单词命名任务中发现了同源（双语者的两种语言中具有相同含义和相似拼字音系形式的单词）促进效应。在句子层面，当同源词嵌入句子上下文中时，跨语言激活也会持续存在。总而言之，这些发现表明，在第二语言句子处理过程中，第一语言言语信息对同源词的影响可能比非同源词更明显。 Cramer Scaltz 女士的实验将检查高度熟练的西班牙语-英语双语者在两项眼球追踪研究中的表现，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。她还将调查同源词提供的词汇激活的增加是否会引导双语者在第二语言句子处理过程中使用第一语言口头信息。双语参与者将参加一系列能力测试，并用第二语言完成动词规范调查问卷，以确定他们对英语口头信息的了解。双语者在这些任务上的表现将与单语对照进行比较。这项研究将为说话者如何利用第一和第二口头信息提供新的见解，并将为更详细地探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知识中获益铺平道路。研究结果将丰富对学习第二语言的基本理解，同时为向成人语言学习者教授第二语言结构模式提供有用的信息。此外，该项目将增加训练有素的语言研究人员库的多样性，同时为海外西班牙裔学者与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.