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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2012

JILL JEGERSKI
JILL JEGERSKI*
Affiliation:
College of Staten Island, City University of New York
*
Address for correspondence: College of Staten Island-CUNY, Department of World Languages and Literatures, 2S-109, 2800 Victory Boulevard, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA[email protected]
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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.

Keywords

bilingual sentence processingadult language acquisitionsubject–object ambiguitiesMexican Spanishself-paced reading
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 721 - 735
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant 0844035, by a Dissertation Grant from Language Learning journal, and by a Provost's Award for Graduate Research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Second Language Research Forum in 2009. I extend my deepest gratitude to Bill VanPatten for the idea for this project and for superlative guidance and mentorship throughout. I am also very grateful to Marilyn Buck, Caleb Clardy, Clyde “Chico” James, Eileen Locke, and the faculty, staff, and students at the CELE of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City for their invaluable support. Finally, I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Any remaining errors or omissions are my own.

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