Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Language history attenuates syntactic prediction in L1 processing

  • Research Paper
  • Published:
Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

An eye-tracking experiment in the Visual World Paradigm was conducted to examine the effects of language history on the predictive parsing of sentences containing relative clauses in the first-learned language of fluent bilingual adults. We compared heritage speakers of Spanish (HSs)—who had spent most of their lives immersed in an English-dominant society—to Spanish–English late bilinguals (LBs), who did not begin immersion in an English-dominant society until adulthood. Consistent with studies of monolinguals, the LBs demonstrated a subject/object relative clause processing asymmetry, i.e. a processing advantage during subject relative clauses and a processing disadvantage during object relative clauses. This suggests that the LBs actively predicted the syntactic structure of subject relative clauses, consistent with the active filler hypothesis. The HSs, on the other hand, did not exhibit this processing asymmetry, suggesting less active prediction. We conclude, therefore, that decreased exposure to the first-learned language causes less active prediction in first-language processing, which causes both disadvantages, and interestingly, advantages, in processing speed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Despite the typological and methodological robustness of the SRC preference, it is likely not a complete universal (e.g. Basque: Carreiras et al. 2010). Even in Basque, however, an asymmetry exists, such that ORCs are easier to process than SRCs.

  2. A reviewer suggested that we include proficiency as its own predictor variable, along with group, in our regression models. However, we decided against this in the present study because proficiency was strongly correlated with group (r = 0.65, p < 0.001), which would have reduced the reliability of the models’ parameters (Hutcheson and Sofroniou 1999). A follow-up study (Stover et al. in progress) will investigate the role of continuous measures of language dominance in explaining the group patterns observed here.

  3. Note that Traxler et al. (2002) only analyzed fixations on the matrix verb itself. However, since comprehension of the object of the matrix verb is crucial for our participants to select the correct image, we chose to include both the matrix verb and its object in this region. Future analyses will examine whether particular events within each region contributed significantly to changes in fixation proportions.

References

  • Allopenna, P. D., Magnuson, J. S., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory and Language,38(4), 419–439.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition,73, 247–264.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (2007). The real-time mediation of visual attention by language and world knowledge: Linking anticipatory (and other) eye movements to linguistic processing. Journal of Memory and Language,57, 502–518.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arnon, I. (2005). Relative clause acquisition in Hebrew: Toward a processing-oriented account. In A. Brugos, M. R. Clark-Cotton, & S. Ha (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 37–48). Somerville: Cascadilla Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bar, M. (2007). The pro-active brain: Using analogies and associations to generate predictions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,11, 280–289.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bar, M. (2009). The pro-active brain: Memory for predictions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,364, 1235–1243.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software,67(1), 1–48.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Benmamoun, E., Montrul, S., & Polinsky, M. (2013). Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics,39(3–4), 129–181.

    Google Scholar 

  • Betancort, M., Carreiras, M., & Sturt, P. (2009). The processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish: An eye-tracking study. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,62(10), 1915–1929.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Birdsong, D., Gertken, L. M., & Amengual, M. (2012). Bilingual language profile: An easy-to-use instrument to assess bilingualism. COERLL: University of Texas at Austin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bonifacci, P., Giombini, L., Bellocchi, S., & Contento, S. (2011). Speed of processing, anticipation, inhibition and working memory in bilinguals. Developmental Science,14(2), 256–269.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Borovsky, A., Elman, J., & Fernald, A. (2012). Knowing a lot for one’s age: Vocabulary skill and not age is associated with anticipatory incremental sentence interpretation in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,112(4), 417–436.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Brouwer, S., Özkan, D., & Küntay, A. C. (2017a). Semantic prediction in monolingual and bilingual children. In E. Blom, L. Cornips, & J. Schaeffer (Eds.), Cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. In honor of Aafke Hulk (pp. 49–73). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Brouwer, S., Sprenger, S., & Unsworth, S. (2017b). Processing grammatical gender in Dutch: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,159, 50–65.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Caplan, D., Alpert, N., Waters, G., & Olivieri, A. (2000). Activation of Broca’s area by syntactic processing under conditions of concurrent articulation. Human Brain Mapping,9, 65–71.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Caplan, D., Vijayan, S., Kuperberg, G., West, C., Waters, G., Greve, D., & Dale, A. M. (2002). Vascular responses to syntactic processing: Event-related fMRI study of relative clauses. Human Brain Mapping,15(1), 26–38.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Carreiras, M., Duñabeitia, J. A., Vergara, M., de la Cruz-Pavía, I., & Laka, I. (2010). Subject relative clauses are not universally easier to process: Evidence from Basque. Cognition,115, 79–92.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Chan, A., Chen, S., Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2017). Comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in a trilingual acquisition context. Frontiers in Psychology,2017, 8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review,113(2), 234–272.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1989). Comprehending sentences with long-distance dependencies. In G. N. Carlson & M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Linguistic structure in language processing. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooke, A., Zurif, E. B., DeVita, C., Alsop, D., Koenig, P., Detre, J., et al. (2002). Neural basis for sentence comprehension: Grammatical and short-term memory components. Human Brain Mapping,15, 80–94.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology,6, 84–107.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dahan, D., Swingly, D., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Magnuson, J. S. (2000). Linguistic gender and spoken-word recognition in French. Journal of Memory and Language,42, 465–480.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dussias, P. E., Kroff, J. R. V., Tamargo, R. E. G., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand: Grammatical gender processing in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,35, 353–387.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism Language and Cognition,10(1), 101–116.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ezeizabarrena, M. J., Munarriz, A., & Loidi, U. (2017). Bilingual production of relative clauses in languages with opposite head-complement directionality. In K. Bellamy, M. W. Child, P. González, A. Muntendam, & M. C. P. Cuoto (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world (pp. 283–309). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Federmeier, K. D. (2007). Thinking ahead: The role and roots of prediction in language comprehension. Psychophysiology,44(4), 491–505.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Federmeier, K. D., McLennan, D. B., De Ochoa, E., & Kutas, M. (2002). The impact of semantic memory organization and sentence context information on spoken language processing by younger and older adults: An ERP study. Psychophysiology,39, 133–146.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fernandez, E. M. (2002). Relative clause attachment in bilinguals and monolinguals. In R. R. Heredia & J. Altarriba (Eds.), Bilingual sentence processing (pp. 187–215). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Foucart, A., Martin, C. D., Moreno, E. M., & Costa, A. (2014). Can bilinguals see it coming? Word anticipation in L2 sentence reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory, and Cognition.

  • Frazier, L. (1987). Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,5, 519–559.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Cera, C., & Sandoval, T. C. (2008). More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language,58(3), 787–814.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or real-time processing problem? Second Language Research,28(2), 191–215.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Grüter, T., Rohde, G., & Schafer, & A. J. (2014). The role of discourse-level expectations in non-native speakers’ referential choices. Proceedings of the annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.

  • Guillelmon, D., & Grosjean, F. (2001). The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals. Memory and Cognition,29(3), 503–511.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hopp, H. (2012). Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability. Second Language Research,29(1), 33–56.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hu, S., Gavarró, A., Vernice, M., & Guasti, M. T. (2016). The acquisition of Chinese relative clauses: Contrastic two theoretical approahces. Journal of Child Language,43(1), 1–21.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Huettig, F., Rommer, J., & Meyer, A. J. (2011). Using the visual world paradigm to study language processing: A review and critical evaluation. Acta Psychologica.

  • Hutcheson, G., & Sofroniou, N. (1999). The multivariate social scientist: Introductory statistics using generalized linear models. London: Sage Publication.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1993). The intensity dimension of thought: Pupillometric indices of sentence processing. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology,47(2), 310–399.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Just, M., Carpenter, P., & Keller, T. (1996). Brain activation modulated by sentence comprehension. Science,274, 114–116.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kahraman, B., Sato, A., Ono, H., & Sakai, H. (2010). Relative clauses processing before the head noun: Evidence for strong forward prediction in Turkish. In H. Maezawa & A. Yokogoshi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL6). MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 61 (pp. 155–170). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., & Haywood, S. L. (2003). The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language,49, 122–156.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language: A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • King, J., & Kutas, M. (1995). Who did what and when? Using word- and clause-level ERPs to monitor working memory usage in reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,7, 376–395.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2017). lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software,82(13), 1–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kwon, N., Kluender, R., Kutas, M., & Polinsky, M. (2013). Subject/object processing asymmetries in Korean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data. Language (Baltim),89(3), 537–585.

    PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science,18(3), 193–198.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2010). Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language,63(4), 447–464.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Li, P., Sepanski, S., & Zhao, X. (2006). Language history questionnaire: A Web-based interface for bilingual research. Behavior Research Methods,38(2), 202–210.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • MacWhinney, B., & Pleh, C. (1988). The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian. Cognition,29, 95–141.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Mak, W. M., Vonk, W., & Schriefers, H. (2002). The influence of animacy on relative clause processing. Journal of Memory and Language,47(1), 50–68.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mani, N., & Huettig, F. (2012). Prediction during language processing is a piece of cake—but only for skilled producers. Journal of Experimental Psychology,38(4), 843–847.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, C. D., Thierry, G., Kuipers, J., Boutonnet, B., Foucart, A., & Costa, A. (2013). Bilinguals reading in their second language do not predict upcoming words as native readers do. Journal of Memory and Language,69, 574–588.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miyamoto, E., & Nakamura, M. (2003). Subject/object asymmetries in the processing of relative clauses in Japanese. In G. Garding & M. Tsujimura (Eds.), Proceedings of the west coast conference on formal linguistics 22 (pp. 342–355). Somerville: Cascadilla Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Montrul, S. (2010). Dominant language transfer in adult second language learners and heritage speakers. Second Language Research,26(3), 293–327.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nakamura, C., Arai, M., & Mazuka, R. (2012). Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure. Cognition,125, 317–323.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Nation, K., Marshall, C. M., & Altmann, G. T. M. (2003). Investigating individual differences in children’s real-time sentence comprehension using language-mediated eye movements. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,86, 314–329.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • O’Grady, W., Schafer, A. J., Perla, J., Lee, O., & Wieting, J. (2009). A psycholinguistic tool for the assessment of language loss: The HALA project. Language Documentation and Conservation,3(1), 100–112.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ospina, R., & Ferrari, S. L. P. (2012). A general class of zero-or-one inflated beta regression models. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis,56(6), 1609–1623.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2007). Do people use language production to make predictions during comprehension? Trends in Cognitive Sciences,11, 105–110.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Piquado, T., Isaacowitz, D., & Wingfield, A. (2010). Pupillometry as a measure of cognitive effort in younger and older adults. Psychophysiology,47(3), 560–569.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Polinsky, M. (2011). Reanalysis in adult heritage language: New evidence in support of attrition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,33, 305–328.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Puig-Mayenco, E., Cunnings, I., Bayram, F., Miller, D., Tubau, S., & Rothman, J. (2018). Language dominance affects bilingual performance and processing outcomes in adulthood. Frontiers in Psychology,2019, 9.

    Google Scholar 

  • R Core Team (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.

  • Rigby, R. A., & Stasinopoulos, D. M. (2005). Generalized additive models for location, scale and shape, (with discussion). Appl. Statist.,54(3), 507–554.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scherag, A., Demuth, L., Rösler, F., Neville, H. J., & Röder, B. (2004). The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects. Cognition,93(3), B97–B108.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Schneider, W., Eschman, A., & Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-Prime (Version 2.0). [Computer software and manual]. Pittsburgh: Psychology Software Tools Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scontras, G., Fuchs, Z., & Polinsky, M. (2015). Heritage language and linguistic theory. Frontiers in Psychology,6, 1545.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Slobin, D. (1985). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. I and II. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stover, L. M., Stern, M. C., Lowry, C., Martohardjono, G., & Madsen II, C. N. Effects of language dominance on L1 relative clause processing(Manuscript in preparation).

  • Stowe, L. A. (1986). Parsing WH-constructions: Evidence for on-line gap location. Language and Cognitive Processes,1, 227–245.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stromswold, K., Caplan, D., Alpert, N., & Rauch, S. (1996). Localization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission tomography. Brain and Language,52, 452–473.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science,268(5217), 1632–1634.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tolentino, L. C., & Tokowicz, C. (2011). Across language, space, and time: A review of the role of cross-language similarity in L2 (morpho)syntactic processing as revealed by fMRI and ERP methods. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,33(1), 91–125.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Traxler, M. J., Morris, R. K., & Seely, R. E. (2002). Processing subject and object relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language,47, 69–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • White, L., Goad, G., Goodhue, D., Hwang, G., & Lieberman, M. (2013). Syntactic ambiguity resolution in L2 parsing: Effects of prosodic boundaries and constituent length. In Proceedings of the annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.

  • Wu, F., Luo, Y., & Zhou, X. (2014). Building Chinese relative clause structures with lexical and syntactic cues: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking and reading times. Language Cognition and Neuroscience,29(10), 1205–1226.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our study participants, Richard G. Schwartz, and Second Language Acquisition Lab research assistants Daniela Castillo, Omar Ortiz, Christina Dadurian, Andrea Monge, Matthew Stuck, and Armando Tapia.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY, 10016, USA

    Michael C. Stern, Christen N. Madsen II., LeeAnn M. Stover, Cass Lowry & Gita Martohardjono

Authors
  1. Michael C. Stern
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Christen N. Madsen II.
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. LeeAnn M. Stover
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Cass Lowry
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Gita Martohardjono
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael C. Stern.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

On behalf of all authors, Michael C. Stern states that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Stern, M.C., Madsen, C.N., Stover, L.M. et al. Language history attenuates syntactic prediction in L1 processing. J Cult Cogn Sci 3, 235–255 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-019-00048-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-019-00048-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation