The processing of subject–object ambiguities in native and near-native Mexican Spanish

• JILL JEGERSKI ^[1]
  1. [1] City University of New York

     City University of New York

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 15, Nº 4, 2012, págs. 721-735
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject–object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish whose native language was a non-null subject language like English. Twenty-three near-native and 33 native readers of Mexican Spanish read sentences like Cuando el escultor acabó/volvió la obra tenía tres metros de altura “When the sculptor finished/came back the piece was three meters in height”. The results suggest that (i) Spanish differs from English for this type of processing and (ii) native and near-native processing can be guided by largely similar principles, at least where lexical information like verb transitivity is concerned.