Spanish-English Bilinguals' Processing of Two Types of Causative Constructions

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to compare the processing cost and the acceptability judgment of two syntactic configurations from two types of causative sentences that are licensed in English, and their equivalent syntactic configurations in Spanish, which is a language that only licenses the first: Causative sentences with change of state verbs (COS), and causative sentences with induced movement alternation (IMA). This research departs from the studies of Cook (2004), and his idea of multi-competence, and, at the same time, it is based on the investigations of Souza & Oliveira (2011), Souza (2012, 2014) and Fernandez & Souza (2016), in which the same cross-linguistic variation was studied in Brazilian Portuguese-English bilingual samples. 70 people were tested during this research, dividing them into three categories according to their scores in the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT): Monolinguals (MN, n=30), low proficiency bilinguals (LPB, n=30), and high proficiency bilinguals (HPB, n=10). They answered two adaptations of the instruments used in Fernandez and Souza (2006) (one in Spanish and one in English) in which the processing cost and the acceptability judgment were measured though a self-paced reading task and an acceptability judgment task. The results obtained from these experiments suggest a higher cost to process sentences that contained the IMA structures in all the samples from this research, opposite to the results of Fernandez and Souza (2016). In addition, the grades from the judgment task from all samples support such resistance to IMA sentences in the Mexican groups, since they considered them as ungrammatical sentences. These results suggest a higher flexibility in the Brazilian Portuguese-English bilingual samples from Fernandez and Souza (2016) to sentences that contain IMA structures, while Mexican Spanish-English bilinguals do not present such flexibility.