Kwon, N. 1 & Sturt, P. 2
1 Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
2 University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, UK.
Bilinguals show a disadvantage in lexical access in production (Ivanova & Costa, 2008). Here we investigate whether they also show a disadvantage in the use of lexical information in parsing. Giver (refusal) and Recipient (“request”) control nominals dictate that the empty pronominal PRO refers to “Roger” in (1) but cannot in (2) (Culicover & Jackendoff, 2006). If the parser uses such lexical information on-line, and actively searches for the antecedent for PRO, a reduced garden path effect is predicted in (2); “the teenagers” cannot be the antecedent for PRO in the object position of “stop” (Condition C violation) and will be correctly parsed as the main clause subject. In an eye-tracking experiment, monolinguals showed such a reduced garden path effect in (2) compared with (1), but early bilinguals (of English-Chinese; English-dominant; AOA of English before age 5) showed equal effects in (1) and (2). Thus, although early bilinguals may perform like monolinguals within the syntactic domain (Kotz et al., 2007), they make less use of lexical information in parsing. (1) Giver Control, Ambiguous/Disambiguated: After Roger_i's refusal PRO_i/*k to stop/stop, the teenagers_k felt... (2) Recipient Control, Ambiguous/Disambiguated: After Roger_i's request PRO_*i/k to stop/stop, the teenagers_k felt...