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Article published In: Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children
Edited by Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Shanley E.M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika and Leigh B. Fernandez
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5] 2019
► pp. 600–627

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Investigating vulnerabilities in grammatical processing of bilinguals

Insights from Basque-Spanish adults and children

 | Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language | Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478
 | Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478 | Université Bordeaux-Montaigne
 | Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Science, University of Oslo
Published online: 9 October 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17035.pou
Abstract
Bilinguals show a large gap in their expressive-receptive abilities, in both languages. To date, most studies have examined lexical processing. The current study aimed to assess comprehension and production of verb agreement, i.e., grammatical processing, in bilinguals, and to examine the factors that might modulate them: exposure, age and language-specific morphological complexity. Twenty balanced Basque-Spanish bilinguals (10 adults and 10 children) were assessed on comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement in both languages and object-verb agreement in Basque. Twenty age-matched Spanish-dominant Basque-Spanish bilinguals were assessed in Spanish only. The results revealed a consistent gap in Basque in both children and adults, with an advantage for comprehension. In Spanish, a gap appeared in children only, with an advantage for production. The gap size did not vary with the amount of language exposure but with age and morphological complexity, suggesting that these factors modulate bilinguals’ grammatical processing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Gap between comprehension and production in the language processing of bilinguals
    • 1.2Grammatical processing of verbs in production and comprehension
    • 1.3Gap in grammatical processing of verbs in bilinguals: The current study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Tasks
      • 2.2.1Stimuli
      • 2.2.2Sentence production task
      • 2.2.3Sentence comprehension task
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Data pre-processing
    • 3.2Subject-verb agreement in Basque and Spanish
      • 3.2.1Overall results on comprehension and production performance
      • 3.2.2Role of exposure, age and morphological complexity on the gap size
    • 3.3Object-verb agreement in Basque
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Role of exposure (subject-verb processing in Spanish and Basque)
    • 4.2Role of age (adults and children)
    • 4.3Morphological complexity
      • 4.3.1Subject-verb agreement
      • 4.3.2Object-verb agreement
  • 5.Limitations of the study
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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