Cross-Linguistic Transfer of Verb Bias among Spanish-English Adolescents

Abstract

For bilingual speakers, languages interact with each other. Bilingual speakers may use the knowledge in their first language to process sentences in their second language, also known as cross-linguistic transfer. The current study focuses on the role of first-language verb biases while using the second language in bilingual adolescents. In English, verbs may more frequently be followed by either a sentential complement (e.g., The sweet girl believed that the book was about a princess) or a direct object (e.g., The excited kids heard the news). Previous studies on verb bias have focused on adult participants. Bilingual adolescents are an understudied group in the psycholinguistics literature. The participants in the present study are Spanish-English bilingual children who are 8 to 15 years old. They demonstrated a verb bias effect during online sentence processing at the end-of-sentence region. Reverse reading times between Match and Mismatch conditions, suggesting potential cross-linguistic transfer from Spanish to English, particularly among lower-proficiency participants. In comparison, comprehension accuracy was mainly influenced by L2 proficiency and did not reliably reflect verb bias effects, indicating that transfer was more evident in online processing than in offline comprehension.