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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese LINKING COMPREHENSION COSTS TO PRODUCTION PATTERNS DURING THE PROCESSING OF MIXED LANGUAGE A Dissertation in Spanish and Language Science by Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo 2012 Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2012 ii The dissertation of Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo was reviewed and approved* by the following: Paola E. Dussias Associate Professor of Spanish, Linguistics, and Psychology Dissertation Co-Advisor Co-Chair of Committee Rena Torres Cacoullos Professor of Spanish and Linguistics John M. Lipski Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Linguistics Judith F. Kroll Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Women’s Studies Chip Gerfen Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese Dissertation Co-Advisor Co-Chair of Committee *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Studies on codeswitching have focused mainly on production. The experiments reported in this dissertation focus, instead, on how Spanish-English bilinguals process codeswitches during reading comprehension. Two types of intrasentential codeswitches are examined here: a switch between the Spanish progressive auxiliary estar ‘be’ and an English present participle versus a switch between the Spanish perfect auxiliary haber ‘have’ and an English past participle. Despite their superficial similarities, estar+English participle switches are more frequent in natural bilingual production corpora than haber+English participle switches. The main objective of this dissertation is to examine whether comprehension costs reflect production patterns, by investigating if the more frequent switches involving the progressive structure are easier to process than the less frequent switches involving the perfect structure. This set of studies also examines whether age of second language acquisition and task play a role in the way these two types of codeswitches are processed. Groups of early bilinguals and late bilinguals took part in an eye-tracking study in which they were asked to read sentences to complete two tasks: a comprehension task and an acceptability judgment task. The participant groups exhibited similar results in the comprehension task. That is, estar+English participle switches were processed more easily than haber+English participle switches, reflecting the tendencies found in natural production. In the acceptability judgment task, the early bilinguals no longer displayed sensitivity to the distributional patterns of these different types of switches, and instead processed both of them with similar difficulty. The late bilinguals, however, were less affected by the task and, therefore, processed the codeswitches in the acceptability judgment task similarly to the way that they did in the comprehension task. Both early and late bilinguals displayed no switch costs when reading codeswitched sentences, compared to unilingual sentences. Overall, these results lend support for iv constraint satisfaction models of sentence processing (MacDonald & Seidenberg, 2006), such as the Production-Distribution-Comprehension approach (Gennari & MacDonald, 2009; MacDonald & Thornton, 2009). When bilinguals complete a task that resembles natural comprehension, the comprehension costs that they exhibit are directly related to the distributional patterns of the codeswitches in natural production. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................. viii LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................... ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................................... xi Chapter 1 Codeswitching: From grammatical studies on production to psycholinguistic studies on comprehension ................................................................................................ 1 1.1 The grammatical study of codeswitching .................................................................. 2 1.1.1 Linear constraints on codeswitching ............................................................... 3 1.1.2 Hierarchical constraints on codeswitching ...................................................... 5 1.2 The psycholinguistic study of codeswitching ............................................................ 7 1.3 Codeswitches involving the auxiliary phrase ............................................................. 10 1.3.1 Unacceptability of auxiliary phrase switches .................................................. 10 1.3.2 Acceptability of auxiliary phrase switches ...................................................... 11 1.4 Asymmetry in naturalistic production of codeswitches ............................................. 12 1.4.1 Asymmetry in naturalistic production of auxiliary phrase switches ............... 13 1.4.2 Accounting for the asymmetrical production of auxiliary phrase switches .... 14 1.4.2.1 Morpheme classification account ......................................................... 15 1.4.2.2 Grammaticalization account ................................................................. 16 1.4.2.3 Structural distance account ................................................................... 20 1.5 Comprehension of codeswitches ................................................................................ 23 1.6 Relating comprehension costs and production patterns ............................................. 25 1.7 Justifying a focus on reading comprehension ............................................................ 28 1.8 Relating reading and auditory sentence comprehension ............................................ 30 1.9 Task effects on sentence processing .......................................................................... 31 1.10 Aims of this dissertation .......................................................................................... 36 Chapter 2 Spanish-English auxiliary phrase switches in oral and written corpora ................. 38 2.1 Data ............................................................................................................................ 39 2.1.1 Oral corpus ...................................................................................................... 39 2.1.2 Written corpus ................................................................................................. 40 2.1.3 Differences between the oral and written corpora ........................................... 41 2.2 Extraction and coding methods .................................................................................. 44 2.3 Results ........................................................................................................................ 46 2.3.1 Oral corpus ...................................................................................................... 46 2.3.2 Written corpus ................................................................................................. 49 2.4 Discussion .................................................................................................................. 51 vi Chapter 3 Comprehension costs associated with auxiliary phrase switches ........................... 55 3.1 Research questions ..................................................................................................... 56 3.2 Method ....................................................................................................................... 57 3.2.1 Participants ...................................................................................................... 57 3.2.1.1 Language History Questionnaire .......................................................... 58 3.2.1.2 Boston Naming Vocabulary Test ......................................................... 58 3.2.1.3 Grammatical competency tests ............................................................. 59 3.2.2 Materials and Design ....................................................................................... 61 3.2.3 Procedure ......................................................................................................... 64 3.3 Predictions .................................................................................................................. 65 3.4 Results ........................................................................................................................ 66 3.4.1 Results for the comprehension task ................................................................. 68 3.4.1.1 Early bilinguals ..................................................................................... 69 3.4.1.2 Late bilinguals ...................................................................................... 71 3.4.2 Results for the acceptability judgment task ..................................................... 72 3.4.2.1 Early bilinguals ..................................................................................... 73 3.4.2.2 Late bilinguals ...................................................................................... 75 3.5 Discussion .................................................................................................................. 76 3.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................