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The Influence of LanguageExposure on Lexical and Syntactic

Language ProcessingTracy Love 1 , Edwin Maas, 1,2 and David Swinney 1

1 University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA and 2 San Diego State University, CA

Abstract. Previous literature has argued that proficient bilingual speakers often demonstrate monolingual-equivalent struc-tural processing of language (e.g., the processing of structural ambiguities; Frenck-Mestre, 2002). In this paper, we explorethis thesis further via on-line examination of the processing of syntactically complex structures with three populations:those who classify as monolingual native English speaker (MNES), those who classify as non-native English speakers(NNES), and those who classify as bilingual native English speakers (BNES). On-line measures of processing of object-relative constructions demonstrated that both NNES and BNES have different patterns of performance as compared toMNES. Further, NINES and BNES speakers perform differently from one another in such processing. The study alsoexamines the activation of lexical information in biasing contexts, and suggests that different processes are at work in thedifferent type of bilinguals examined here. The nature of these differences and the implications for developing sensitivemodels of on-line language comprehension are developed and discussed.

Key words: psycholinguistics, bilingual, on-line, sentence comprehension

Introduction

There is a wealth of research in the literature explor-ing the moment-by-moment details involved in pro-cessing on-going, fluent speech (across a variety of syntactic constructions) by monolingual listeners.speakers of a language (particularly English). Thequestion of how such evidence may be related to theprocessing of similar constructions by listeners,speakers of multiple languages is, however, relativelyunderspecified at this time. In recent years, bilin-gualism has become an increasingly important re-

search topic as it provides us with new insights intothe potentials for the mental representation and pro-cessing of language in the human mind (e.g., DeGroot & Kroll, 1997; Romaine, 1995). Indeed, thereseems to be growing consensus that bilinguals arenot merely two monolinguals in one person, butrather that the language system of a bilingual may

The authors gratefully acknowledge the NIH grantDC 02984, which supported this research. Special thanksto Grace Shaio and Vikki Bouck for their assistance indata collection and analysis.

DOI: 10.1027 1618-3169.50.3.204

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differ in important ways from that of a monolingualboth functionally (Dussias, 2001; Grosjean, 1989,1997) and neurologically (e.g., Kim, Relkin, Lee, &Hirsch, 1997; Perani et al., 1996). Thus, importantgeneralizations may be missed if models of languageprocessing are developed exclusively from researchon monolinguals. The level of such generalizationsmay ultimately hold for processing in general or al-ternatively be stated across all aspects of languageas different at each independent level of languageanalysis. At this point, the evidence for importantdifferences in processing between monolingual andbilingual speakersilisteners is somewhat mixed -with arguments that (at least certain types of) bilin-guals and monolinguals handle language processingin much the same fashion, and of course, with argu-ments holding the opposite position. One issue inthis debate centers on the tape of bilingual popula-tion one compares to monolingual population. An-other issue, the one we will begin with here, centerson the level of language processing one is evaluating.

Much of the research on bilingualism has focusedat the word-processing level of language analysis.This research has used relatively immediate mea-

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sures of processing (such as reaction-time mea-sures - as found in lexical decision times or transla-tion times) to draw inferences about word-level pro-cessing in bilingual subjects (e.g., Dufour & Kroll,1995; Keatley, Spinks, & De Gelder, 1994; Kotz,2001; Scarborough, Gerard, & Cortese, 1984; Sega-lowitz, Segalowitz, & Wood, 1998). The work on bi-lingualism which has focused on sentence-level pro-cessing has largely examined comprehension andproduction (e.g., Altarriba, Kroll, Sholl, & Rayner,1996; Hernandez, Bates, & Avila, 1996; Lanza,1997; Slobin, 1997; Soares & Grosjean, 1984; Stock-man, 1996) using "off-line" measures of processing.Off-line measures are generally untimed tasks, suchas grammaticality judgment tasks or sentence picturematching tasks, which take place following sentenceprocessing rather than during on-going processing.They are sensitive at revealing ultimate states of comprehension or production, but are relatively lesssensitive to revealing the moment-by-moment pro-cesses that occur during the comprehension or pro-duction process itself. Notably, while the monolin-gual on-line sentence-level processing literature hasflourished in the past, few studies (with some notableexceptions) have used what have become standard"on-line" measures of processing, measures whichare capable of isolating details of the sub-processesinvolved in ongoing comprehension and production.A recent collection by Heredia and Altarriba (2002)has compiled many of the few extant studies employ-ing sentence-level processing using on-line measures(see for example Altarriba, Kroll, Sholl, & Rayner,1996; Heredia & Stewart, 2002; Hernandez, Bates, &Avila, 1996).

The present study was focused on providing anon-line study of sentence-level processing. In partic-ular, we were concerned with comparing the minutedetails of structural processing of Monolingual na-tive English speakers (hereafter NINES) with twoother proficient English speaking groups: non-native(proficient) English speakers (hereafter: NNES) andbilingual native English speakers (hereafter: BNES).

There are only a few models that directly addressbilingual sentence level, structural processing. Theylargely fall into two general themes: those that arguethat structural processing in the bilingual mind is ul-timately a blend of grammatical tendencies, strate-gies, or rules of the first language (L1) and the se-cond language (L2), and those that argue that auto-matic structural routines are largely kept independentof each other for each language. The more recentevidence from researchers such as Cuetos and Mitch-ell (1988), Dussias (2001), Fernandez (2002), andFrenck-Mestre (2002), among others, has lead towhat is now the likely dominant belief that sentencesfrom Ll and L2 are processed via one structuralroute with such processes ultimately resulting from


Lexical and Syntactic Language Processing 205

a blending of strategies from all language to whichthe listener has been exposed (particularly dependingon level of expertise in L2). Such an approach wouldfit well with general statistically driven models of language comprehension, as found in, for example,the competition model of Bates and MacWhinney(1989). However, only a few types of structures andonly a few levels of L1 and L2 expertise have beenexamined to date. It is early in the science to con-clude that the statistical-blending hypotheses willhold for structural processing in all cases. Indeed, wehave chosen a different type of structural process toexamine here than has been previously studied in thebilingual literature.

The structural process we chose to focus on wasthe processing of object-relative constructions inEnglish. The goal was to determine whether profi-cient English speakers (all demonstrably proficientwith English) all operate in the same immediate, re-flexive manner to such constructions, independent of their exposure to additional languages. We chose theobject-relative construction to examine both becauseit is relatively common in English and because thereexists a large literature detailing the on-line, mo-ment-by-moment processing of this structure. Alongwith this study of structural processing, we also,simultaneously, provide an examination of the natureof immediate lexical access in strong biasingcontexts in NON-MNES (non-monolingual Englishspeakers) populations via use of lexical ambiguity.

One additional motivation for our study stemmedfrom an apparent conflict between observations inour laboratories and those in some of the literature.For the past few years we have noticed the appear-ance of subtle differences in on-line performance of multi-language exposed (but English proficient)speakers and English native monolingual speakersduring sentence-level processing. However, there ex-ist reliable observations in the literature on the pro-cessing of structural information which have beenused to support the argument that there is little differ-ence in structural processes between such popula-tions (at least for certain structural processes). Thus,for example, Frenck-Mestre (2002) monitored eye-movements in reading structural ambiguities, andfound that proficient bilinguals looked much like na-tive readers. We felt that examination of a differentstructural process, and use of a different experimen-tal on-line technique, would provide a strong test of the breadth and generalizeability of such conclu-sions.

There is an extensive literature about how MNESprocess English object-relative constructions, such as"The policeman saw the boy who the crowd accusedof the crime." In such constructions, the direct objectof the verb accused has been moved out of its canon-ical (English) post-verb position and placed in front

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206 Tracy Love, Edwin Maas, & David Swinney

of the verb (and, in this case, the relativizer who hasbeen added). It is standardly argued that the underly-ing meaning of such a sentence is essentially: ["Thecrowd accused the boy of the crime" and "The po-liceman saw the boy"]. The literature over the past15 years has been filled with empirical studies exam-ining how the monolingual comprehender actuallycomes to recover the underlying meaning from theobject-relative surface form of this utterance. A largerange of on-line studies have examined, for example,whether the comprehender actually re-activates themoved direct object (boy ) immediately after hearingthe verb (accused ) , or whether the verb-object rela-tion is established at some later point in processing(at the end of the sentence, for example). For details,see, among many others, on-line studies by Balogh,Zurif, Prather, Swinney, and Finkel, 1998; Bever andMcElree, 1988; Clahsen and Featherston, 1999;Hickok, 1993; Kluender and Kutas, 1993; Love andSwinney, 1996; Nicol and Pickering, 1993; Nicol andSwinney, 1989; Stowe, 1986; Tanenhaus, Boland,Garnsey, and Carlson, 1989. The over-arching con-clusions from such work is that MNES appear tostandardly re-activate the moved ( fronted ) direct ob-

ject ( boy ) immediately after the verb is processed inthe sentence. In short, it appears that MNES under-stand such sentences by immediately recovering thecanonical subject-verb-object order of such non-ca-nonically ordered sentences. Such a process maymake particular sense for comprehension in English,in which word order plays such a strong role.

To provide a bit of detail as to the nature of theon-line evidence that supports this immediate reacti-vation (canonical re-ordering), in what follows, wewill briefly describe results of one such on-line ex-periment which examined precisely this issue. Wewill then use these data as a contrast case to the twonew studies presented below. Love and Swinney(1996) used a cross-modal naming (CMN) task toexamine when, where (or if) moved direct objectswere re-activated during sentence comprehension.The CMN experimental paradigm is a variant of thecross-modal lexical priming paradigm (CMLP;Swinney, Onifer, Prather, & Hirshkowitz, 1979) inwhich participants are presented with an auditorysentence and, at theoretically critical points duringthe uninterrupted presentation of the sentence, aword that is associatively or semantically related tosome aspect of the auditory sentence is presentedvisually on a computer screen. In the CMN para-digm, participants name the visually presented wordas rapidly as possible. Studies with both CMN andCMLP have demonstrated that when a visual word ispresented that is semantically/associatively related toa word that has just been heard in the sentence, it isnamed faster than if it appears after a word in thesentence to which it is unrelated (this general phe-


nomenon is a form of automatic semantic priming;e.g., Meyer, Schvandeveldt, & Ruddy, 1975; Neely,1991). When the experimental materials are equatedand pre-tested appropriately, CMN has proven to bea sensitive measure of what is active at momentarypoints-in-time during ongoing sentence processing.Further, when done appropriately, participants aretypically unaware of relationships between probesand sentences, and it serves as a relatively uncon-scious reflection of the state of the current process-ing of the sentence. 1

Love and Swinney (1996) presented MNES withauditory sentences such as:

"The professor insisted that the exam be com- pleted in ink, so Jimmy used the new pen (1) that hismother-in-law recently (2) purchased_ (3) because themultiple colors allowed for more creativity."

These sentences contain a "fronted direct object"( pen ) of a later-occurring verb ( purchased ). Thestudy employed lexical ambiguities as the fronted di-rect objects, and thus activation of both the primary{writing object } and secondary { jail } meaning of these words could be examined at each of three testpoints: probe position 1 (PP1) = immediately afterthe direct object ( pen ) occurred in the sentence,probe position 2 (PP2) = 700 milliseconds beforethe verb ( purchased ), and probe position 3 (PP3) =immediately after the verb ( purchased ) 2 . Participants were required to understand the sentence (com-prehension questions were asked on a number of tri-als) and also to name a probe word that came on thescreen during the sentence while still comprehendingthe ongoing sentence. 3

The results of the Love and Swinney, 1996 studyare as follows: immediately upon hearing the fronteddirect object (probe position 1), it was found thatnaming times for words related to each meanings of the word pen {writing object and jail} were signifi-cantly faster than those to the matched control words.Note that this is so, even though reaction times tothese words in isolation is equivalent, and that allpre-tests indicated that both visual probes "fit" withthe sentence at all the test points equally well. 4 This

1 For some discussions of the task, see McKoon andRatcliff, 1994; McKoon, Ratcliff, and Ward, 1994; Nicol,Fodor and Swinney, 1994; Seidenberg, 1982; Swinney,1979; Swinney, Love, Nicol, Bouck, Hald, 2000.

2 This was a completely counterbalanced factorial de-sign. In all cases, participants contributed data to all condi-tions, however, no one participant ever heard or saw anysentence/visual probe more than once.

3 Note that the "related" probes only appeared approx-imately 20% of the time throughout the study. Experiments1

and 2 below use the identical materials and design asfound in Love and Swinney 1996.

4 Please see Love and Swinney, 1996 for specific de-tails of all the pretest information and analysis of the mate-rials.



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result is consistent with earlier findings (e.g., Swin-ney, 1979) that demonstrated that immediately aftera target word is heard in a sentence, responses torelated visual probes are primed as compared to un-related (control) visual probes. In that case, as inLove and Swinney (1996) related probes to bothmeanings of the ambiguity were primed even in a

prior, strongly biasing context. Following immediateaccess of all meanings of an ambiguous word, Loveand Swinney (1996) also found that these primingeffects disappeared for both meanings of the fronteddirect object when tested a short time later in thesentence (PP2). Importantly, however, they foundthat at PP3 (immediately after the verb) there wassignificant priming again found for the contextuallyrelevant (in this case, "primary" interpretation of theambiguous direct object), but no priming for the "ir-relevant" interpretation of the ambiguity. Thus, whenmonolingual, native English listeners (NINES) heara verb (in English) in a sentence in which there hadbeen a fronted direct object, they immediately reacti-vate the stored contextually relevant meaning of thatdirect object in its canonical post-verb position.Comprehension, at least for NINES, appears to in-volve the immediate recovery of canonical Subject-Verb-Object relationships during ongoing compre-hension. See Table 1 for these priming results.

Table 1. Priming Effects (in ms; control minus re-lated) for Naming Times for Primary andSecondary Meanings of the Ambiguity atall Three Probe Points for NINES; Based onNaming Time Means Presented in Love andSwinney (1996)

* p < . 05, one-tailed ns = nonsignificant difference

The use of ambiguous words as the fronted directobject in the present study also allowed us to exam-ine the nature of lexical access in strongly biasedcontextual conditions in bilingual populations. Thereis an extensive literature that has examined whetherinitial lexical access is autonomous and independentfrom prior biasing contexts or whether it is guidedby predictions from such contexts. The Love andSwinney (1996) study strongly supported an auton-omy view of lexical access during comprehension byfinding priming for both meanings of an ambiguousword even in strong biasing contexts (see Tabossi,1988). The current study enables us to pursue thisissue with NON-MNES (non-monolingual Englishspeaking) populations.

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To the best of our knowledge, there have beenno on-line investigations of object-relative sentenceprocessing in bilingual/multilingual listeners (seeHeredia & Stewart, 2002). The very meager sentencestructural-processing literature on bilingual popula-tions is a bit mixed as to whether bilinguals and mon-olinguals differ in their on-line structural processing.On the one hand, there are studies by Hahne andFriederici (2001) and Weber-Fox and Neville (1996)using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), whichreveal that late (and not highly proficient) L2 learn-ers differed greatly in their response to violations of syntactic structure from monolingual native speak-ers. (Monolinguals display an early left anterior neg-ativity in response to violations of syntactic struc-ture, but the late/nonproficient learner populationsshow no such effect.) These results suggest that someaspects of automatic syntactic processing in some bi-linguals may differ from such processing in monolin-guals. However, such differences might be expectedin populations that are not overly proficient in thetested language. On the other hand, the examinationof structural processing with proficient L2 speakers/ learners so far suggests that there may be little differ-ence in the processing between this group and nativemonolingual speakers (Frenck-Mestre, 2002; instudies of on-line syntactic attachment).

The present studies were aimed at investigatingthe degree to which English proficient L2 speakers/ listeners use the same moment-by-moment processesin on-line comprehension of noncanonical structuralrelationships, such as found in object-relative Eng-lish constructions. The following two studies usedthe exact same materials and methodological designas Love and Swinney (1996), on two different Eng-lish-proficient bilingual populations.

Experiment 1: Immediate Activationof Word Meaning(s) DuringSentence Understanding

The goal of this initial study was to ascertain whichof the materials from the Love and Swinney (1996)study would provide a valid basis for examining thereactivation of fronted direct objects at post-verb ca-nonical positions in multilingual populations. Ourdesire was to utilize the data and materials of Loveand Swinney exactly as they were originally de-signed, because that study had carefully controlledfor: 1) participants being native monolingual Englishspeakers/listeners only (no exposure to foreign lan-guage before the age of 6, no other language spokenin home, no proficiency in any language but Eng-lish); 2) associativity/relatedness of visual probes(both related and control) to the key words (the

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Meaning ProbePosition ^1

ProbePosition ^2

ProbePosition ^3

Primary + 12* + 3 ns + 21*Secondary + 8 * + 5 ns + 2 ns


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fronted direct objects) in the sentence based on rat-ings by native monolingual English speakers/listen-ers; and 3) judgments of equivalence of relatednessbetween the related and control probes to sententialmaterial at each probe point, (for both "goodness of continuation" and "relationship to entire sentence,"

based on NINES judgments; and 4) a priori reaction-time matches for related and control probes (in anisolated naming task), again, based on NINES pop-ulations. However, as everything was carefully testedon NINES populations, we knew that all of these ma-terials would not be equally well matched or effectivewith populations other than native monolingual Eng-lish speakers. For this reason, we first set out to findwhich of our materials would replicate the most basicof sentence-level effects; i.e., priming for relatedprobes (compared to controls) immediately afterhearing a critical word of interest (again, the fronteddirect object) in a sentence.

Methods

Participants

Forty-four college students participated in Experi-ment 1 (note that Love and Swinney (1996) had 51NINES participants in the equivalent experiment).All participants were students at University of Cali-fornia, San Diego (UCSD) who participated forcourse credit; all participants had normal or cor-

rected-to-normal vision and hearing, and had no his-tory of neurological problems.Based on self-report questionnaires, participants

were classified either as bilingual native Englishparticipants (BNES) or nonnative English partici-pants (NNES). The same questionnaire procedurewas used in Love and Swinney (1996) to categorizeNINES groups. Criteria for inclusion in the BNESgroup were self-ratings (responding "yes") to ques-tions: 1) "Are you a native English speaker?"; 2)"Were any other languages, besides English, spokenat home before you were 6 years old?"; and 3)"Was(were) the language(s) spoken at home before

age 6 spoken "in phrases" or "conversationally"?"(individuals were not included in this group if theyreported that they were only exposed to "words hereand there" in another language).

The NNES group differed from the BNES grouponly in that they answered "no" to the question "Areyou a native English speaker?" The age at which theNNES participants considered themselves fluent inEnglish ranged from 3 to 15 years old ( M = 10.2years). Of the 44 participants run in this study, 14failed to meet the language (or other pre-determined)criteria, thus excluding them from any analysis.


Tracy Love, Edwin Maas, & David Swinney

Based on the language criteria listed above, therewere 20 BNES bilinguals (15 female, 5 male; M age = 20.1, range 17-25) and 10 NNES bilinguals(7 female, 3 male; M age = 20.1, range 18-25). Inboth the BNES and the NNES group, there was ex-posure (or more) to a variety of language(s) otherthan English (Cantonese, French, Greek, Italian, Ko-rean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Viet-namese). Note that most of these languages rely lesson word order for structure than does English. Fi-nally, all participants were proficient in English.They were not only high-performing students at aUniversity with stringent English entrance require-ments and English-only teaching, they originallyself-selected themselves for participation in the study(our initial screening criteria) as proficient nativeEnglish speakers; however, based on our furtherscreening measures, as just detailed above, we re-classified them into the BNES and NNES categories.

Finally, BNES and NNES participants were matchedon comprehension performance tests on these mate-rials (off-line) to the same criteria stylized for NINESparticipants (in Love and Swinney, 1996).

Materials and Design

We have noted that the materials and design wereidentical to those used in Love and Swinney (1996).Note that this implies that all the pretesting of stimuliwas originally performed on native monolingualEnglish speakers, an issue that guided this first study,

and that will be discussed below in this study. Here,we present the entire materials and designs for thisstudy (and that of Love and Swinney, 1996).

Materials consisted of 40 experimental object-rel-ative sentences constructed as in the following exam-ple (repeated from the introduction):

"The professor insisted that the exam be com- pleted in ink, so Jimmy used the new pen (1) that hismother-in-law recently (2) purchased_ (3) because themultiple colors allowed for more creativity."

The fronted direct object was, in all cases, an am-biguous noun (here, pen ) for which pretests hadestablished a clear primary and clear secondary inter-

pretation for NINES. For the experimental materials,pretests established both a strong associate (one of most frequent associates given to target word) whichwas of moderate frequency for each meaning of thefronted direct object. A word unrelated to the targetword meaning(s) was matched with each relatedprobe for a priori reaction time (again as establishedindependently with a population of NINES partici-pants in isolated word-naming studies). These con-trol words were also matched for length to the relatedprobe words. For the example above, the relatedprobes were PENCIL (primary meaning) and JAIL



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(secondary meaning); the matched control probeswere JACKET and TALE, respectively.

The contexts in these sentences were strongly bi-ased toward the primary interpretation of the ambi-guity ("writing implement", in the example) usingboth the criteria suggested by Tabossi (1988), andmore stringent bias criteria of our own. Five of ourexperimental items were found to not meet thesestringent criteria, and thus, only 35 experimentalitems were considered for further data analysis. Inaddition, 40 "filler" sentences were created (samelength and general complexity) for which an unre-lated probe word would appear at a pseudorandomplace during the sentence (never at the very begin-ning or end). In addition 10 practice sentences, againof the same general length and construction werecreated with 9 of the 10 having unrelated probewords. The three test points are marked by arrows.The first immediately follows the ambiguous fronted

direct object ( pen ) ,

the second appears 700 ms beforeonset of the critical verb ( purchased ) , and the thirdis at the offset of the critical verb (where canonical-order based reactivation might be expected. In Ex-periment 1, only probe point 1 came into play. In acompletely counterbalanced factorial design, partici-pants heard all 90 sentences (randomly arranged af-ter the practice materials). For each sentence, theywere required to (primarily) listen to the sentencesand understand them (they were tested randomlythroughout the study with a multiple-choice compre-hension test inquiring about some aspect of a sen-tence they had just heard - largely to keep attention

of participants on the comprehension task). Theywere also presented with a visual probe at some pointduring each sentence (in Experiment 1, at the firstprobe point for experimental sentences), and theywere required to name the visual probe as rapidly aspossible while still listening to the ongoing sentence.Participants never heard a sentence more than onceand only saw one of the 4 possible experimentalprobes. All probe types were equally distributedacross all materials conditions. Thus, there were fourexperimental group (materials counterbalancing)conditions, and eleven participants were randomlyassigned to each group condition.

We note here again that each probe was submittedhere to two pretests with the sentence with which itwas paired: a goodness of fit pretest and a goodnessof continuation pretest. These pretests were per-formed by obtaining judgments from a large inde-pendent group of subjects ranking how well a probe"fit with the portion of the sentence that had beenheard" and "provided a good continuation for theportion of the sentence heard" up to each point atwhich a probe might appear (in this experiment andin Experiment 2). The only related-control materialsthat were used were those which were matched on



these rating for both of these variables (see Love &Swinney, 1996, for further details).

Procedure

Participants entered a room and were given pretestquestionnaires to fill out (the basis for selection intoMNES, BNES, and NNES groups). Following that,they were comfortably seated in front of a computermonitor in a sound attenuated booth, and were toldthat they had two tasks. The first was to listen toand understand sentences that they would hear overheadphones. They were told that, at certain timesduring the experiment, they would be tested on thecontent of the sentence they heard. Their second task was to watch the computer screen, and, wheneverthey saw a word appear on the screen, they were toname it aloud as rapidly as they could. As in all

cross-modal studies of this type, the auditory sen-tence continued on, uninterruptedly, even while thevisual probe was presented.

Each participant's attention was focused on themiddle of a screen (where the word would appear)by means of a black mask that allowed only a smallword-sized area of the screen to be visible. The parti-cipants' voiced responses were recorded via micro-phone by a tape recorder and by the computer. Onsetof the voice response stopped timing which had initi-ated with the onset of the visual probe word. TheRTLAB program controlled for all of the usual tim-ing problems in video display (raster position, etc.),

so timing was accurate to less than 1 ms. This pro-gram also recorded all reaction time responses. ASony DAT recorder was used to present the auditorysentences to the participants.

The experiment was paused 5 times for each subject (each pause following a filler sentence and wasprior to another filler sentence) and participants wereasked a multiple choice question about the contentof the sentence they had just heard. Following eachsuch pause, participants were reminded of the tasksin the study.

Results

Experiment 1 was designed to serve as a basic replica-tion of two well-established effects in the literature:1) that a visual probe word occurring immediatelyafter a related word in a continuously presented audi-tory sentence would demonstrate priming for related(compared with unrelated) probes; and 2) evidence of the activation of more than one interpretation of a lexi-cal ambiguity even following occurrence of a stronglybiasing context (e.g., Onifer & Swinney, 1981; Swin-ney, 1979; Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Seidenberg, 1979).



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As noted earlier, because we had intentionallypretested all of our materials solely on MNES pop-ulations, we anticipated that many of our probes, etc.might not be effective for NON-MNES (non-mono-lingual native English speakers) populations. (Note,we explicitly did not want to use different probeswith different populations.) Our initial analysis wastherefore aimed at examining results from all popula-tions for some evidence of a basic word priming ef-fect for our materials (in order to determine whichprobes and sentence could even possibly reflect acti-vation and, possibly, reactivation.)

For data analysis, we established as criteria thatwe would only further analyze materials for whichwe established reliable on-line priming for at leastthe contextually relevant, primary (most frequent)meaning of the lexical ambiguity, when tested imme-diately after its occurrence. This is theoretically neut-ral with regard to our hypotheses under question (re-activation at the post-verb gap site) and, most impor-tantly, is critical to any judgment of appropriatenessof our materials in that essentially every study of on-line sentence processing (whether with this task orany other) has demonstrated that, with appropriatematerials, the contextually relevant, primary (mostfrequent) interpretation of an ambiguous word is ac-cessed (e.g., with cross-modal tasks: Onifer & Swin-ney, 1981; Swinney, 1979; Tabossi, 1988; Tanenhaus,Leiman, & Seidenberg, 1979). Of the 35 experimen-tal items (again, five failed to match the bias criteriaof Tabossi, 1988, etc.), only 14 were found to de-monstrate any evidence of priming of the contextu-ally relevant, most frequent (primary) meaning of theambiguous word immediately after it was heard. Werestrict our further analysis and discussion to these14 items which demonstrated standard priming ef-fects; these are the only materials (probes plus sen-tences) from the prior study that we could reasonablyassume were appropriate to all three of our targetedpopulations. We also present an analysis of a reducedset of items from the Love and Swinney (1996) datato establish that the effects reported there hold for14 selected items with NINES.

MNES: Reanalysis of 14 Items from the Love EtSwinney (1996) Data Set for PP1

As in the original Love and Swinney (1996) data set,reaction times under 300 ms and over 2000 ms wereremoved. In addition, any reaction times differing bymore than 2 standard deviations (SD) of the overallmean for each participant were removed. Analyseswere performed on the remaining data of the 14items for probe point 1 (PP1). Table 2 presentsmeans for these items for all conditions. As can beseen, there is a 56 ms priming effect (t 50 = 5.375, p



< . 001) for the contextually relevant, primary inter-pretation of the ambiguous word, and a 26 ms prim-ing effect (t 50 = 2.318, p < .02) for the contextuallyirrelevant and less frequent interpretation of the am-biguous word. This replicates effects reported for theentire MNES materials set in Love and Swinney, inwhich contextually independent lexical access wasdemonstrated (even in the most strongly biased mate-rials types).

Table 2. MNES: Reanalysis of Mean RTs (SDs ) atPP1 for the 14 Experimental Items fromLove and Swinney (1996) data

* p < .025+ indicates facilitation (priming) for naming times forrelated compared to control probes

The further analyses of the bilingual groups arepresented both for all NON-MNES participants to-gether, and then for the BNES and NNES groupsseparately. We note at the outset that the small Ns(particularly for the NNES group) may make it likelythat real effects/significance may be missed. How-ever, as will be seen by comparing these perfor-mances of groups separately across test points 1, 2,and 3, different mechanisms appear to be at work inprocessing of object-relative constructions by thesegroups; differences that would be missed if we onlypooled the bilingual populations.

NON-MNES: Combined Results for PP1

The screening procedures described above resultedin a data loss of 4.7% of the data. The first datacolumn of Table 3 presents the results for the com-bined NON-MNES population tests.

As can be seen in Table 3, when combining bothBNES and NNES ( n = 30) the following patternsappear in the data: there is a 39ms priming effectevident for the primary meaning and a 20 ms prim-ing effect for the secondary meaning.

For both bilingual groups combined, the overallsubjects ANOVA with meaning (primary vs. second-ary) and probe type (related vs. control) as withinsubjects factors and language group (BNES vs.NNES) as the between subjects factor revealed only


Meaning NINES (n = 51)

primary control probes 564(79)related probes 508 (53)

+ 56*secondary control probes 565 (82)

related probes 538 (67) + 27*


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Table 3. Mean RTs (SDs ) at PP 1 for the 14 Experimental Items

+ indicates facilitation (priming) for naming times for related compared to control probesCohen's effect size (1988), d, is noted next to the difference score in {brackets}

a main effect of language group, F 1(1, 29) = 19.667, p < .0001. There were no other main effects or sig-nificant interactions, meaning: F 1(1, 29) = .025, p< .89; probe position: F 1(1, 29) = 1.7, p < .2; ProbeType: F 1(1, 29) = .362, p < .6. In an items analysison these data, there was a significant main effect of probe type F 2(1, 13) = 8.61, p < .01. There were noother significant main effects or interactions; all F s< 1, except Language Group x Meaning: F 2(1, 13) =2.85, p < .1; and Meaning x Probe Type: F 2(1, 13) =1.39, p < .25.

As can be seen in Table 3, the mean reactionti mes for both the contextually relevant primary andthe less frequent secondary meanings were signifi-cantly faster than reaction times for the controlwords. A priori planned comparisons revealed thatthese were significant priming effects (primarymeaning: t 29 = 2.88, p < .01, secondary meaning:t 29 = 1.72, p < .04). Thus viewed overall, the NON-NINES groups also provide evidence of "exhaustive"access of all interpretations of an ambiguous wordimmediately after hearing it in a strongly biasedcontext sentence, as do their NINES counterparts onthese materials.

BNES: Analyzed Separately at PP1

When data from the 20 BNES are examined sepa-rately, the overall subjects ANOVA demonstrates a

significant main effect for probe type, F 1(1, 19) =5.203, p < .03. All other main effects and interac-tions were not significant. All F 2s < 1, except forprobe type, F 2(1, 13) = 1.77, p < .2.

Of most significance to the hypothesis under in-vestigation, a priori planned comparisons showed asignificant priming effect for the primary meaningt 19 = 2.64, p < .01, mean 39 ms effect, Cohen'seffect size, d = .6), 5 but not for the secondary mean-

5 Cohen's (1988) effect size is a measure of the magni-tude of a treatment effect. The effect size is noted by d ,


Lexical and Syntactic Language Processing

ing ( t 19 = 1.00, p < .17, M = 15 ms effect, Cohen'seffect size, d = . 2). See second data column of Table3 for details. Thus, at least for this population andset of materials, only the primary interpretation of the ambiguity was accessed, suggesting that we maypotentially encounter an interesting time-course dif-ference for activation of meaning interpretation andof integration of context effects in this population ascompared with NINES.

NNES: Analyzed Separately at PP1

For the 10 NNES participants, the overall subjectsANOVA demonstrated a significant main effect for

probe type, F 1(1, 9) = 4.146, p < .05. All other maineffects and interactions were not significant. In anitems analysis on these data, there was a main effectof probe type, F 2(1, 13) = 10.97, p < .002. Therewas no significant main effect of meaning, F 2(1,13) = 3.53, p < .07, nor was there a significantMeaning x Probe Type interaction, F 2(1, 13) = 2.01,

p < .17).Most importantly, the a priori planned compari-

sons revealed that there was no significant primingfor either meaning (primary: t 9 = 1 .32, p < .12, M =39 ms effect, Cohen's effect size, d = . 4; secondary:t 9 = 1.54, p < . 08, M = 30 ms effect, Cohen's effect

size, d = .5, although the latter is a marginal effect).See data column 3 of Table 3.

which is a descriptive measure and is defined as the differ-ence between the means, M1 - M2, divided by the standarddeviation of either group. Cohen argued that the standarddeviation of either group could be used when the variancesof the two groups are homegeneous. Effect sizes are gen-erally defined as "small, d = . 2," "medium, d = .5," and"large, d = .8".


211

Meaning BNES + NNES (n=30) BNES (n = 20) NNES (n = 10)

primary control probe 593 (78) 584 (68) 611 (97)related probe 554 (70) 545 (74) 572 (60)

+ 39 ** +39 **{.6} + 39 {.4}

secondary control probe 569 (103) 562 (118)583 (69)

related probe 549 (81) 547 (88) 553 (67)

+ 20 * + 15ns {.2} + 30*** {.5}

* p < .05, one-tailed** p < .01, one-tailed*** p = .08


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Experiment 2 - The Search forActivation/Re-activation of FrontedDirect Objects Following Their VerbsDuring Sentence Processing

Methods

Participants

Eighty-nine bilingual (BNES and NNES) collegestudents participated in Experiment 2. All partici-pants were students at UCSD and participated forcourse credit; all had normal to corrected-to-normalvision and hearing and had no history of neurologicalproblems. Using the criteria described in Experiment1, the BNES consisted of 41 participants (25 female,16 male; M age = 19.7, range = 18-23), whereasthe NNES group consisted of 36 participants (29 fe-

male, 7 male; M age = 18, range = 17-26). In addi-tion to the native languages represented in the NON-MNES samples in Experiment 1, this study also in-cluded Arabic, Armenian, Farsi, Hungarian, Roma-nian, and Taiwanese.

Materials, Design, and Procedures

The same materials and procedures as described inExperiment 1 were used in Experiment 2, with theexception that probes appeared in this study at eitherprobe position 2 or probe position 3. In this study,

two tapes were created which were identical, exceptthat probe points 2 and 3 were equally counterbal-anced across the tapes. These two tape conditionswere combined with the four visual probe list condi-tions (as in Experiment 1) in a counterbalanced fac-torial design in which, again, no participant heard orsaw the same experimental sentence more than once.Thus, participants saw equal numbers of experimen-tal items, related probes at each test point, but allfrom different experimental items. This multi-facto-rial design contained a 2 (probe position) x 2 (proberelatedness) x 2 (Ambiguity meaning) withinfactors -- by - 4 x 2 between-factors (materials

counterbalancing) conditions.

Results Experiment 2

PP2 and PP3

The goal of Experiment 2 was to discover whether,like MNES, English proficient but NON-MNESpopulations perform canonical restructuring in ob-

ject-relative constructions immediately upon pro-



cessing the verb (often called the "gap") during on-going sentence comprehension. Thus, the test pointsin Experiment 2 were designed to reflect the levelsof activation for each of the meanings of the ambigu-ous word at the post-verb gap (PP3) and at a "base-line" point shortly before the gap (PP2).

MNES Results for PP2 and PP3

The analysis of the MNES data from the originalLove and Swinney (1996) study demonstrated thatneither of the meanings of the fronted ambiguity (di-rect object) was still active (showed significant prim-ing) at a point 700 ms before the verb (PP2). How-ever, at PP3 the contextually relevant primary mean-ing of the ambiguity was found to be significantlyreactivated (the secondary interpretation was not);this was the evidence taken to support immediate ca-nonical-reordering of interpreted structures. The se-condary meaning had not been chosen as "relevant"and stored earlier in the sentence, and hence was notreactivated at the post-verb gap (See Table 1). Thereanalysis of the 14 items chosen for this study fromthe original MNES data of Love and Swinney alsoreveals this same effect: The primary (contextuallyrelevant) meaning of the fronted direct object showedno significant priming ( M = 10 ms priming) at PP2t 87 = 1.56, p


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Table 4. Mean RTs (SDs) at PP2 and PP3 for the 14 Experimental Items for All NON-NINES populations

* p < .05, one-tailed** p < .0001, two-tailed+ indicates facilitation (priming) for naming times for related compared to control probesCohen's effect size (1988), d , is noted next to the difference score in {brackets}

meaning, while for the secondary meaning there isa -9ms effect (the reaction times for the related

probes were slower than for the control probes). AtPP3, the offset of the verb, there is an 11 ms effectfor the primary meaning and a 32 ms priming effectfor the secondary meaning.

The overall participants ANOVA with between-participants factor language group (BNES vs.NNES) and the within-participants factors probepoint (PP2 vs. PP3), meaning (primary vs. second-ary), and probe type (related vs. control) revealedsignificant main effects for language group, F 1(1,76) = 31.42, p < .0001, and significant interactionsof Probe Point x Probe Type, F 1(1, 76) = 3.98, p

2003 love maas swinney

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