Between language agreement in complex noun phrases

Abstract

Bilinguals are particularly adept at code-switching that is at conveying a message through the joint use of two languages. Recent experiments using elicited code-switching (Hatzidaki, Branigan, & Pickering, 2011) have shown that bilinguals can co-active syntactic information (number, gender, word order) across languages, sometimes even when they only use one of their languages. The current experiment employed a similar methodology to the one designed in the monolingual literature to elicit attraction errors (Bock & Miller, 1991) to study subject-verb agreement in one and two-language sentences. The results suggest there is a considerable degree of integration between the two languages spoken by a bilingual, but that the bilinguals' native/dominant language exerts more influence on syntactic processing even when it is not the language currently used.