Effects of morphosyntactic gender features in bilingual language processing

13 years 4 months ago

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A central issue in bilingual research concerns the extent to which linguistic representations in the two languages are processed independently of each other. This paper reports the results of an empirical study and a model stimulation, which provide evidence for the interactive view, which holds that processing is not independent. Specifically, a reading experiment examined whether morpho-syntactic features associated with lexical representations in a bilinguals' native language, in this case the masculine gender feature associated with the er ending of agentive nouns in German, are automatically activated by the processing of morphologically related representations in their second language, in this case English agentive nouns that end in er. Experimental findings suggest that the German

Matthias Scheutz, Kathleen M. Eberhard

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