Dussias, P.
Pennsylvania State University, State College, USA
When we read sentences in our second language, we face many uncertainties about how the people or objects referred to in the text are connected to one another. This is so because when our eyes move along the printed line, the information needed to establish correct dependencies between word strings is not yet available. So what does the second language (L2) reader do under these conditions of uncertainty? Because L2 speakers who are relatively proficient in two or more languages have access to the grammar and lexicon of each language when they comprehend written sentences, one critical question concerns whether the specific semantic and syntactic sub-processes engaged during L2 language comprehension are different when monolingual speakers and second language speakers process input in the target language. In this talk, I will examine how differences in the linguistic systems of a bilingual’s two languages might influence the syntactic representations that adult L2 learners compute during comprehension. I will also discuss how the bilinguals’ characteristics and specific linguistic experience may determine their performance in reading comprehension tasks.