Subject–Verb Number Agreement in Bilingual Processing: (Lack of) Age of Acquisition and Proficiency Effects

Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Languages (Basel) 2022-03, Vol.7 (1), p.15
Main Authors: Sagarra, Nuria, Rodriguez, Nicole
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Age
Age of acquisition
AoA
Bilingualism
Brain research
Children
Eye movements
Grammatical agreement
Grammatical number
Grammatical subject
L2 morphosyntactic processing
Language acquisition
Language proficiency
Language usage
Morphology
Morphosyntax
proficiency
Reading
Salience
Semantics
Spanish language
Speech perception
subject–verb agreement
Verbs
Violations
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Summary:Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.
ISSN:2226-471X
2226-471X
DOI:10.3390/languages7010015