The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish-English bilinguals

An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish-English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish-English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The ambiguity concerned whether a relative clause (RC) that appeared after a complex noun phrase (NP) was interpreted as modifying the first or the second noun in the complex NP (El policia arresto a la hermana del criado que estaba enferma desde hacia tiempo). The results showed that whereas the Spanish monolingual speakers and the Spanish-English bilinguals with limited exposure reliably attached the relative clause to the first noun, the Spanish-English bilingual with extensive exposure attached the relative to the second noun. Results are discussed in terms Of models of sentence parsing most consistent with the findings.