The processing of subject–object ambiguities in native and near-native Mexican Spanish

• Published in: Bilingualism (Cambridge, England) Vol. 15; no. 4; pp. 721 - 735
• Main Author: JEGERSKI, JILL
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.10.2012
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Ambiguity (Semantics); Bilingualism; Contrastive Linguistics; Criminal sentences; English; Foreign Countries; Form Classes (Languages); Garden Path Effect; Grammatical subject; Language Processing; Language Variation; Linguistic Theory; Mexico; Native Language; Prediction; Pro Drop Parameter; Reading Processes; Second Language Learning; Sentences; Spanish; Spanish language; Syntactic Processing; Valence; Verbs; Word Order; Mexico; bilingual sentence processing; Mexican Spanish; subject–object ambiguities; adult language acquisition; self-paced reading
• ISSN: 1366-7289; 1469-1841
• DOI: 10.1017/S1366728911000654

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.