The Production of Subject Anaphoric Expressions in Italian and Mexican Spanish: A Forced-Choice Experimental Study.

We compare the production of anaphoric expressions in Spanish and Italian. In two sentence completion tasks, Spanish and Italian-speaking participants complete sentence fragments where we manipulate the location of the antecedents (in a main or subordinate clause), the gender of the antecedents (similar or different) and the referent of the anaphoric expression (subject or object antecedent). Our results show a weaker subject bias for null pronouns and a weaker object bias for overt pronouns in Spanish compared to Italian.

Prediction at the Discourse Level in Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Eye-Tracking Study.

In two experiments, we examine English monolinguals' and Spanish-English bilinguals' ability to predict an upcoming pronoun referent based on the (IC) bias of the verb. In an eye-tracking experiment, the monolingual data show anticipation of the upcoming referent for NP1-bias verbs. For bilinguals, the same effect is found, showing that bilinguals are not slower than monolinguals at processing the information associated with the IC of the verb.

On-line processing of English which-questions by children and adults: a visual world paradigm study.

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and wh-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and non-syntactic information to resolve syntactic ambiguity by extending our understanding of number features as a cue for interpretation to which-subject and which-object questions. We compared children's and adults' eye-movements to understand how this information shapes children's commitment to and revision of possible interpretations of these questions.

Referential choice in a second language: evidence for a listener-oriented approach.

One central question in research on spoken language communication concerns how speakers decide how explicit to make a referential expression. In the present paper, we address the debate between a discourse-based approach and a listener-based approach to the choice of referring expressions by testing second language (L2) learners of English on the production of English referential expressions, and comparing their performance to a group of monolingual speakers of English. In two experiments, we found that when native speakers of English use full noun phrases, the L2 speakers tend to choose a pronoun, even when the use of a pronoun leads to ambiguity.

Processing and to locate objects and events: An ERP study with L2 speakers of Spanish.

In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require while those that locate events require (both translated in English as 'to be'). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the different types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of 'object/event + ' permutations.

The impact of number mismatch and passives on the real-time processing of relative clauses.

Language processing plays a crucial role in language development, providing the ability to assign structural representations to input strings (e.g., Fodor, 1998).