TY - JOUR
T1 - Processing ser and estar to locate objects and events
T2 - An ERP study with l2 speakers of Spanish
AU - Dussias, Paola E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Paola E. Dussias is Professor of Spanish, Linguistics and Psychology and Associate Director of the Center for Language Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research takes a cross-disciplinary approach to bilingual sentence processing. Using a variety of methods, ranging from off-line questionnaires to eye-tracking and ERP methods during reading and spoken language comprehension, she examines the way in which second language readers and listeners negotiate the presence of two languages in a single mind. Her work, which has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, has appeared in journals such as Bilingualism, Language and Cognition, The International Journal of Bilingualism, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, as well as in a number of edited volumes.
Funding Information:
The writing of this article was supported in part by NSF Grant BCS-0821924, NSF Grant BCS-0955090, NSF Grant OISE-0968369, and NIH Grant 1R21HD071758-01A1 to P. E. Dussias. We thank Eleonora Rossi, Janet van Hell and Megan Zirnstein for helpful comments. All errors are our own.
Funding Information:
Patricia Román is currently a post-doctoral research associate at the Center for Language Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Granada (Spain) where she focused on studying inhibitory control in memory and language selection. After that, she was awarded with a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government to work at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig). Her research is centered on the behavioral and neural correlates of sentence processing in bilinguals and the mechanisms that deal with the specificities of bilingualism in language processing compared to monolinguals.
Publisher Copyright:
© John Benjamins Publishing Company.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - In Spanish locative constructions, a diferent form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as ‘to be’). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the diferent types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of ‘object/event + estar/ser’ permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar; event + ser) and incorrect (object + ser; event + estar) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while ‘object + ser’ constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, ‘event + estar’ combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word ‘en’ showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La festa es en la cocina). Tis P600 efect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defning predicate when it does not ft with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La festa está en la cocina), the fndings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were signifcantly less accurate than native speakers in all conditions, while the advanced speakers only difered from the natives in the event+ser and event+estar conditions. For the ERPs, the beginning learners did not show any efects in the time-windows under analysis. Te advanced speakers showed a pattern similar to that of native speakers: (1) a P600 response to ‘object + ser’ violation more central and frontally distributed, and (2) a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms for ‘event + estar’ violation. Findings for the advanced speakers suggest that behavioral methods commonly used to assess grammatical knowledge in the L2 may be underestimating what L2 speakers have actually learned.
AB - In Spanish locative constructions, a diferent form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as ‘to be’). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the diferent types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of ‘object/event + estar/ser’ permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar; event + ser) and incorrect (object + ser; event + estar) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while ‘object + ser’ constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, ‘event + estar’ combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word ‘en’ showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La festa es en la cocina). Tis P600 efect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defning predicate when it does not ft with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La festa está en la cocina), the fndings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were signifcantly less accurate than native speakers in all conditions, while the advanced speakers only difered from the natives in the event+ser and event+estar conditions. For the ERPs, the beginning learners did not show any efects in the time-windows under analysis. Te advanced speakers showed a pattern similar to that of native speakers: (1) a P600 response to ‘object + ser’ violation more central and frontally distributed, and (2) a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms for ‘event + estar’ violation. Findings for the advanced speakers suggest that behavioral methods commonly used to assess grammatical knowledge in the L2 may be underestimating what L2 speakers have actually learned.
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U2 - 10.1075/resla.27.1.03dus
DO - 10.1075/resla.27.1.03dus
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84928957517
SN - 0213-2028
VL - 27
SP - 54
EP - 86
JO - Revista Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada
JF - Revista Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada
IS - 1
ER -