| Bilingualism is prevalent, with over half of the population of the world being bilingual. While bilinguals have traditionally been viewed as having two separate languages, modern views of language suggest that languages are not completely separate in the mind. This is especially evident in cases of intrasentential code-switching, when a speaker switches languages mid-sentence. Such points are of interest because they represent cases when the languages are activated simultaneously.;This dissertation expands our understanding of multi-language representation by investigating whether some grammatical representations generated by Spanish-English bilinguals and Spanish L2 language learners during reading are specific to the input language used to create the representation, or whether those representations are language-independent. Using eye-tracking, we measured reading times on nouns in grammatical (determiner-noun) and ungrammatical (adverb-noun) contexts, in both same language and mixed language pairs, as participants performed a two-string lexical decision task.;Experiment 1 found that bilinguals read nouns faster following determiners than adverbs. Crucially, this grammatical predictability effect did not interact with the same/mixed language variable. This suggests that grammatical predictability in this context is language-independent, not affected by language nor the presence of a language switch. Experiment 2 found a similar pattern for Spanish language learners, though it was not significant. When the data for Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were combined, there was a main effect of grammaticality that did not interact with language congruency, suggesting that language-independent predictions influenced reading times for both bilinguals and language learners.;Experiment 3 took into account categorical ambiguity, i.e., that the same word can belong to more than one grammatical class. We computed two conditional probabilities over abstract grammatical categories to represent grammaticality in a more fine-grained way, allowing syntactic category ambiguity. Participants read the second word faster as its probability given the category of the first word increased. This grammatical predictability effect was language-independent, in that it was not modulated by a language switch.;Overall, this dissertation provides an in-depth investigation into multi-language representation and grammatical predictability in Spanish/English bilinguals, focusing on syntactic sequences that have the same word order in the two languages. Our results most strongly support the shared syntax view of bilingual language representation, having found language-independent grammatical predictability across experiments. |
