Abstract
This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish whose native language was a non-null subject language like English. Twenty-three near-native and 33 native readers of Mexican Spanish read sentences like Cuando el escultor acabó/volvió la obra tenía tres metros de altura When the sculptor finished/came back the piece was three meters in height. The results suggest that (i) Spanish differs from English for this type of processing and (ii) native and near-native processing can be guided by largely similar principles, at least where lexical information like verb transitivity is concerned.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 721-735 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Bilingualism |
Volume | 15 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 2012 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Mexican Spanish
- adult language acquisition
- bilingual sentence processing
- self-paced reading
- subject object ambiguities
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language