Are bilingualism effects on the L1 byproducts of implicit knowledge? Evidence from two experimental tasks

Abstract

Experimental studies in Linguistics rely on data from human participants performing language tasks. Therefore, understanding the constructs that such tasks tap into is fundamental for the interpretation of results yielded by experimental work. In the present study we address issues brought out by a previously published study based on a timed grammaticality judgment tasks that fails to replicate reported evidence of cross-linguistic interaction effects in bilingual processing of argument structure constructions that are not part of the bilinguals' L1 construction repertoire. Although the timed grammaticality judgment task has been argued to be a valid measure of implicit linguistic knowledge, we review recent psychometric studies that challenge this assumption by showing that this task either does not tap into implicit knowledge at all, or does not tap into it as completely as online processing psycholinguistic tasks do. In the present study, we conducted two experiments with the same pool of subjects. One of the experiments employed an online processing task, and the other employed a timed grammaticality judgment task. In Linguagem, Belo Horizonte, v.25, n.3, p.1685-1716, 2017 1686 our tasks, sentences in Brazilian Portuguese that emulated the linguistic behavior of the English resultative construction were the target items. We report results that show a mismatch in the observations yielded by the two task types, with only the online processing task revealing apparent L2 effects on performance in the L1. We interpret our results by suggesting that the locus of cross-linguistic interactions in bilingual language processing is mostly related to implicit processes. Keywords: implicit knowledge; cross-linguistic influences; psycholinguistic tasks; bilingualism; resultative construction. Revista de Estudos daResumo: Estudos experimentais em Linguística apoiam-se em dados oriundos de desempenho de participantes em tarefas linguísticas. Portanto, a compreensão dos construtos abordados por tais tarefas é fundamental para a interpretação dos resultados gerados pelo trabalho experimental. Neste estudo, explora-se questões trazidas por um estudo previamente publicado baseado em uma tarefa de julgamento de gramaticalidade temporizada que não replicou evidências anteriormente relatadas acerca de efeitos de interações translinguísticas no processamento bilíngue de construções de estrutura argumental que não fazem parte do repertório construcional da L1 dos bilíngues. Apesar da tarefa de julgamento de gramaticalidade temporizada ter sido defendida como uma medida válida de conhecimento linguístico implícito, resenha-se estudos psicométricos recentes que põem este pressuposto em dúvida, ao mostrar que tal tarefa ou não captura conhecimento implícito, ou não o captura tão completamente quanto o fazem tarefas psicolinguísticas de processamento online. Neste estudo, conduz-se dois experimentos com a mesma amostra de sujeitos. Um dos experimentos empregou uma tarefa de processamento online, e o outro empregou uma tarefa ...

Bilingualism effects on L1 representation and processing of argument structure

“…Not only do these results suggest that L2 does not play a major role in L1 acceptability judgment, but they also suggest that timed and untimed acceptability judgments tap into similar kinds of knowledge. Therefore, the results yielded by the maze task and the two speeded acceptability judgment tasks corroborate Souza et al (2016) and Souza & Oliveira (2017). Both studies claim that these two tasks tap into different psycholinguistic mechanisms.…”

“…This strategy aimed at restricting their use of explicit metalinguistic knowledge . It is important to note that recent studies (Souza & Oliveira, 2017) show that the imposition of a time ceiling does not change the tasks' offline nature.…”

When knowing a grammar rule makes L2 users non-native-like

“…Such implicit representations and automatized access routines are not necessarily built up exclusively from the type of explicit information provided by pedagogical grammar teaching approaches. Also, it may be the case that explicit knowledge of language is only accessed in task conditions that allow suicient time and mnemonic manipulations for the needed allocation of attentional resources (Krashen, 1994;Souza and Oliveira, 2017).…”