cac.ophony.org

I just got back from the sunny La Jolla, California, where I participated in the 20th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing. (Yes, it is called ‘the CUNY conference’ and yet held at some other places; it was here last year, but we can’t afford to host it every year anymore!) It is one of the major and prestigious conferences on psycholinguistics, which my research is in, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present a poster with one of my advisors. I had a very nice and fruitful time there.

The field of psycholinguistics is fast growing and expanding. It seemed that this meeting focused a lot on the resolution of pronouns (e.g. when people process ‘he’ in ‘Mickey hit Donald. He…’ what strategies do they employ to decide what ‘he’ refers to?). Although most of the research looked at native speakers’ language processing, there were also some studies on second language processing. I will introduce one of them that was interesting.

This study used a method called eye-tracking. Participants wear a head-mount device that tracks their eye-movement while they look at objects or parts of sentences. In this study, they focused Dutch native speakers also speaking English as a second language. An interesting difference between Dutch and English is that Dutch (as well as many other European languages) makes clearer grammatical gender distinction, especially in pronouns. So in Dutch, a masculine noun like ‘tractor’ is referred to as ‘he’, where as it would be just ‘it’ in English, although it is the same ‘tractor’ in both languages. If you are a Dutch native speaker and use information about their knowledge of Dutch when processing English, there might be some influence coming from it.

The subjects were shown a picture and hear a text in English describing the scene.

(1)The tractor will be driven by Donald.
He is in the other field.

(2) The tractor will be driven by Daisy.
She is in the other field.

As expected, they found that English monolingual subjects they didn’t look too much at the tractor in (1) because it cannot be a candidate for ‘he’. In contrast, the Dutch-English bilingual subjects looked more at the tractor when hearing ‘he’ in (1) than when hearing ’she’ in (2), which means that they are considering the possibility that the tractor might be ‘he’ because it is masculine in Dutch. Interestingly, this phenomenon is limited to ‘cognate’ words between the two languages; if the word is unrelated (e.g. English ‘kite’ and Dutch ‘vlieger’), there is no increase in looks at the object when hearing ‘he’, which means that they don’t use the information about the Dutch word ‘vlieger’ to think about the English ‘kite’; they seem to observe the similarity in form to strategize.

The point that this study makes seems somewhat intuitive, but it was really nice to actually see clear and solid data proving that it is the case. Studying second language processing seems very interesting and it would definitely be a possible future topic of my research. Also this eye-tracking method is really nice; without pressuring them to answer questions or write essays, we can see what’s going on in their heads!