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Referential processing relies on similar cognitive functions across languages – in particular, working memory. However, this has only been investigated in spoken languages with highly similar referential systems. In contrast to spoken languages, American Sign Language (ASL) uses a spatial referential system. It is unknown whether the referential system of ASL (L1) impacts referential processing in English (L2). This cross-language impact may be of particular importance for deaf, bimodal bilinguals who sign in ASL and read in English. Self-paced reading times of pronouns in English texts were compared between ASL–English bimodal bilinguals and Chinese–English unimodal bilinguals. The results showed that L1 referential characteristics influenced pronoun reading time in L2. Furthermore, in contrast to Chinese–English bilinguals, ASL–English bilinguals' referential processing during reading of English texts relied on vocabulary knowledge – not working memory. These findings emphasize the need to expand current theories of referential processing to include more diverse types of language transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores the early stages of incidental acquisition of grammatical gender during reading in German as a second language (L2) using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results show that advanced L2 learners are sensitive to gender agreement violations after as few as three to four exposures to a novel noun within a short text. The results also indicate that the acquisition of grammatical gender from syntactic context is gender dependent: Whereas gender violation effects were observed for feminine and neuter nouns, no such effects were observed for masculine nouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the effects of grammatical gender on bilingual processing. Native speakers of Russian (a gendered language) learning English and monolingual English controls performed a self-paced reading task in English (a non-gendered language). As predicted, bilingual speakers showed delayed latencies to gendered pronouns (he or she) that were incongruent with the noun’s grammatical gender in Russian, indicating that first language (L1) grammatical gender assignment can be interpreted as biological gender in nonnative (L2) processing. The L1 gender bias was only found in sentences containing animate, but not inanimate, nouns. These results speak against the syntactic mechanism being solely responsible for gender biases, but rather support a semantic transfer account due to coactivation of linguistic and conceptual features as proposed in the sex and gender hypothesis (SAGH, Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli & Dworzynski, 2005). Overall, the study provides clear evidence for the L1 grammatical gender bias in bilingual processing, albeit constrained by animacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel combination of several experimental and non-experimental paradigms was applied to explore initial stages of incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) during reading in German as a second language (L2). The results show that syntactic complexity of the context positively affects incidental acquisition of new words, triggering the learner's shift of attention from the text level to the word level. A subsequent semantic priming task revealed that the new words establish associations with semantically related representations in the L2 mental lexicon after just three previous occurrences and without any consolidation period. The semantic inhibition effect for the new words (contrary to semantic facilitation for known L2 words), however, indicates that the memory traces of the new semantic representation are still very weak and that their retrieval is probably hindered by stronger semantically related representations that have much lower activation thresholds and higher potential for being selected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject–object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish whose native language was a non-null subject language like English. Twenty-three near-native and 33 native readers of Mexican Spanish read sentences like Cuando el escultor acabó/volvió la obra tenía tres metros de altura “When the sculptor finished/came back the piece was three meters in height”. The results suggest that (i) Spanish differs from English for this type of processing and (ii) native and near-native processing can be guided by largely similar principles, at least where lexical information like verb transitivity is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]