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Sentence interpretation strategies in adult Dutch–English bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2010

Kerry Kilborn  and
Ann Cooreman
Kerry Kilborn*
Affiliation:
University of California – San Diego
Ann Cooreman
Affiliation:
Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research
*
Kerry Kilborn, Department of Psychology, University of California – San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, U.S.A.
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Abstract

This study is concerned with the probabilistic nature of processing strategies in bilingual speakers of Dutch and English. We used a sentence interpretation task designed to set up various “coalitions” and “competitions” among a restricted set of grammatical entities (i.e., word order, animacy, agreement). Performance in English paralleled that in Dutch in large measure, but where it diverged it approached performance on similar tasks by English monolinguals (Bates et al., 1982). These findings are interpreted on the basis of the “competition model,” a probabilistic theory of grammatical processing which provides a formalism for explaining what it means for a second language user to be “between” languages.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 415 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

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