Symposium Bilingualism at the Sentence Level

ISB5, Barcelona, March 20-23, 2005

Conveners: Rob Hartsuiker & Judy Kroll



The psycholinguistic study of bilingualism has focused predominantly on the organization of the mental lexicon(s) in bilinguals and on the nature of lexical processing. However, the production and comprehension of sentences involves representations and processes beyond the lexical level, and it is only recently that the field has begun to address issues about bilingual sentence processing (see for example a recent special issue in Experimental Psychology, 2003, edited by R. R. Heredia). This symposium brings together studies of sentence processing that examine several key issues: (a) Do factors known to influence word recognition in L2 still come into play in sentence context (Brenders et al.)?; (b) To what extent are decisions about sentence structure in L2 influenced by L1, both in comprehension (Dussias) and production (Flett, Schoonbaert & Hartsuiker)?; and (c) To what extent does bilingualism reflect more general cognitive constraints that influence sentence processing (Hoshino)? Together, these studies provide an important basis on which more complete models of bilingual language processing may be developed and they also hold critical implications for models of sentence processing based on monolingual performance alone.

DownLoad Presentations


1. Does sentence constraint influence visual word recognition in bilinguals? Evidence from Event-Related Potentials and response times
Pascal E. A. Brenders, Janet G. van Hell, & Ton Dijkstra.

2. The comprehension of sentences in Spanish-English bilinguals.
Paola E. Dussias

3. The representation and processing of syntactic structures in second language production.
Susanna Flett

4. Syntactic priming in bilinguals:  Effects of verb repetition in a cross-lingual and L2-monolingual setting.
Sofie Schoonbaert, Rob Hartsuiker, & Martin Pickering (click here for a poster on these data, presented at CUNY 2005).

5. Second language proficiency places cognitive constraints on sentence processing.
Noriko Hoshino

After the presentations...


Cerveza GRANDE Sufie and Sofie Celebrating
 

more pics, courtesy of Ali Flett...