Erdocia, K. , Zawiszewski, A. & Laka, I.
University of the Basque Country
We present results from a series of behavioral and ERP experiments investigating processing preferences in proficient L1Spanish/L2Basque bilinguals. Spanish is head-initial/canonical SVO while Basque is head-final/canonical SOV although both languages allow a certain degree of freedom in surface sentence word order. The experiment was conducted to ascertain whether the L1 of the bilinguals has an impact on their L2 processing, as would be revealed if an SVO processing preference obtained (as opposed to the SOV preference displayed by natives).
In this study we compare Basque natives with highly proficient early Spanish-Basque bilinguals (AoA=3 yrs). Experimental materials consist of (a) a set of SOV OVS SVO OVS sentences in Basque and (b) a set of ambiguous sentences that can be parsed with different word orders that became semantically more or less plausible at final position.
For these L2 bilinguals a comparison of SOV/OSV sentences reveals a modulation of anterior negativities and P600 components for OSV; ambiguous sentences are preferably processed as SOV: a frontal negativity emerged in ambiguous sentences that semantically disambiguated as OSV. Verb medial processing (SVO/OVS) shows a modulation of frontal positivities at S and O positions of OVS relative to SVO, and OVS shows a larger late P600 component at V. Concerning the ambiguity resolution, there is a frontal negative effect for OVS versus SVO.
Regarding all conditions, these results are equivalent to those found for natives (Erdocia et al 2009); thus, proficient L2 bilinguals process sentence word order like natives, despite the different setting of their L1, and this is the case even when the canonical L1 order (SVO) is tested in L2. No signs of linguistic transfer from L1 to L2 is detected regarding this aspect of language processing.