Can English-Spanish Emerging Bilinguals Use Agreement Morphology to Overcome Word Order Bias?

Headnote

PREVIOUS SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION studies have shown that English-speaking learners of Spanish, especially at the beginning and intermediate levels of proficiency, persistently misinterpret Object-clitic Verb Subject (O_clVS) sentences. Due to transfer effects, these learners rely on word order as the most valid cue for agenthood, and, therefore, incorrectly assign the preverbal object clitic the role of agent. In this study we explore whether advanced learners are also prone to such misinterpretation errors, and whether they are able to make use of number agreement morphology to reconfigure their LI processing strategies. In a self-paced reading study, we manipulated match/mismatch in number agreement between the clitic and the verb: in 50 percent of the target sentences, agreement was not a useful cue for overcoming the word order bias (e.g., L0_cl-sg, está_vb-sg, mirando la chica, "The girl is looking at him"), whereas in the other 50 percent the clitic and verb mismatched (e.g., Lo_cl-sg están_vb-pl mirando las chícas, "The girls are looking at him"), so that agreement provided a useful cue for arriving at the correct interpretation of the clitic as the patient. Comprehension questions were used to probe participants' interpretations of the sentences they had read. Results show that even advanced Spanish learners strongly relied on word order when interpreting OclVS sentences. However, learner accuracy improved in the mismatching conditions when the morphological cue indexing agreement mismatch was found on the verb. In addition, participants tended to present longer reading times in the verb region of Cl_sgV_plS_pl structures.

Introduction

The question of how the human processor decides 'who does what to whom' in sentences with noncanonical word order became a focus of interest for cognitive psychologists in the sixties (e.g., Bever 1970; Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown 1963; Slobin 1963, 1966; Slobin and Bever 1982) and later for researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). L°Coco (1982, 1987) and VanPatten (1984) were the first to explore how English-speaking learners of Spanish interpreted OclVS sentences such as "La mira el estudiante" (her-clitic.fem.sing. look at-3rd p. sing. the student, "The student looks at her") and whether L2 learners transferred the processing strategies that had been identified for them in their Li (e.g., Bever 1970)...