SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION WHILE READING IN 2ND AND NATIVE LANGUAGES

Bilinguals' reading strategies were examined in their native and secon d language via the recording of eye movements. Experiment 1 examined t he processing of sentences that contained local syntactic ambiguities. Results showed that bilinguals reading in their second language tende d to resolve these ambiguities in a different way from native readers. Bilinguals tended to prefer to attach incoming information to the mos t recently processed constituent. However, this global strategy was in fluenced by lexical information provided by the verb. Moreover, the co mbined analysis of both groups of readers revealed an influence of ver b subcategorization information on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Exp eriment 2 also examined syntactic ambiguity resolution in the native a nd second language, for sentences that were ambiguous in only one of t he bilinguals' two languages. Results showed that bilinguals hesitated when reading in their second language at points in the sentence where their native language presented conflicting lexical information. Foll owing this localized effect of ''transfer'', however, bilinguals perfo rmed in a manner similar to native speakers of the language. In combin ation, these experiments demonstrate that bilinguals perform a complet e syntactic parsing of sentences when reading in the second language, and they do so in a manner similar to native speakers. Although lexica l information can apparently influence parsing in the second language, our results do not provide strong evidence that it acts to override s yntactic analysis based on structural principles.