Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 227

A grammatical accent in bilinguals can, for instance, be witnessed by looking at the way they parse sentences that are (temporarily) structurally ambiguous in one of their languages but not in the other, or sentences that are structurally ambiguous in both languages but for which the preferred solution differs between these languages. An example of the first type of ambiguity is the English sentence The leader defeated in the election resigned one day later (Rah & Adone, 2010), where defeated can either be the simple past of the transitive main verb or the passive participle of a reduced relative clause, the nonreduced form being who was defeated. In other languages, such as German and Dutch, the relative clause construction always takes a nonreduced form so no temporary ambiguity exists. An example of the second type of ambiguity is the English sentence Someone shot the son of the actress who was on the balcony, where either the head of the complex noun phrase (the son) or the second noun in this phrase (the actress) can be the subject of the relative clause (who was on the balcony). Though both structural solutions occur in English, English favors a “low attachment” analysis of this type of sentences, where the second noun in the complex noun phrase (the actress) is most often the subject of the relative clause. In other languages, such as Spanish, this ambiguous structure also exists (Alguien disparó contra el hijo de la actriz que estaba en al balcón), but the “high attachment” solution is more often correct and preferred. That is, el hijo is most often (initially) assigned the role of relative‐clause subject, forcing a reanalysis of the sentence if later on this solution turns out to be the wrong one (when estaba is encountered). The central question in this line of research is whether bilinguals parse such ambiguous constructions differently from monolingual speakers of the two languages in question, thus evidencing a grammatical accent.

Dussias and her colleagues examined how Spanish–English bilinguals parse sentences of the second type. The results suggested an influence of the other language on the way bilinguals analyze them and that the context of testing may modulate this effect: When testing took place in a predominantly English‐speaking environment in the USA, both Spanish L1/English L2 and English L1/Spanish L2 bilinguals generally favored low attachment over high attachment irrespective of the language of the presented sentences, English or Spanish (Dussias, 2003). In other words, the Spanish sentences were analyzed according to the English‐like parsing strategy, demonstrating an accent in Spanish. In another study (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007), Spanish–English bilinguals immersed in L1 Spanish and presented with Spanish sentences behaved like the monolingual Spanish control subjects, favoring high attachment. In contrast, Spanish–English bilinguals presented with Spanish sentences but immersed in L2 English preferred the low attachment solution that is most common in English, thus showing a grammatical accent in L1. In short, bilinguals appear to prefer the parsing procedure that is most common in the language they are currently exposed to most. This in turn suggests that the two grammatical‐knowledge structures that enable the two different parses are activated to different degrees across different language contexts.