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Determinants of cue strength in adult first and second language speakers of French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Janet L. McDonald  and
L. Kathy Heilenman
Janet L. McDonald*
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
L. Kathy Heilenman
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
*
J. L. McDonald, Department of Psychology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803
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Abstract

This study investigates the determinants of adult usage of various syntactic and semantic cues in sentence interpretation. Native French speakers and advanced English/French bilinguals were tested for the strength of usage of word order, clitic pronoun agreement, verb agreement, and noun animacy cues in the assignment of the actor role in French sentences. Native speakers showed strong use of clitic pronoun agreement, followed by much weaker use of verb agreement, an even weaker use of noun animacy, and negligible use of word order. This ranking reflects the importance of these cues in naturally occurring French sentences involving conflicts among cues in conjunction with a learning-on-error model. The English/French bilinguals did not manifest English-like strategies of word order preference on the French sentences; rather, they showed a cue ranking very similar to that of native speakers, although detectability may have played a role in their use of verb agreement. The failure of English word order strategies to correctly interpret many naturally occurring French sentences may be responsible for the adaptation of strategies appropriate to the second language.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 313 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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