| The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the development of syntactic processing by evaluating the language-processing abilities of monolingual and early, balanced bilingual children and adults. Little is known about monolingual and bilingual children's comprehension of word order. This was examined using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (Golinkoff et al., 1987). It was found that, although 19-month-olds are only in the beginning stages, 27-month-old children comprehend word order in grammatical, transitive sentences containing pronouns, an advanced ability preceding production. However, no clear interpretation of the ungrammatical sentences was demonstrated indicating sensitivity to syntactic information in comprehension. Spanish-English bilingual toddlers did not demonstrate the ability to comprehend these sentences suggesting that they may be slightly delayed in comparison to monolingual children or they may be confusing their grammars. However, on the ungrammatical sentences, the bilingual children interpreted the proper name as the subject regardless of whether the sentence had a Spanish interpretation. This suggests that the Spanish syntax is not having a direct influence on English comprehension at this stage.; Similarly, little is known about adult early bilinguals'. The results of an English grammaticality judgment task revealed no difference between bilinguals and monolinguals in the accuracy of their judgments (see also Johnson & Newport, 1989). However, bilinguals were slower overall to respond than monolinguals, despite balanced usage and an early age of acquisition, indicating a global processing difference between the language groups. Previous research has demonstrated that cross-linguistic syntactic interference occurs for interpretable features, when alternating between languages, and for late bilinguals (Chan, 2004; Meijer & Fox Tree, 2003; Sorace, 2000). However, our early bilinguals demonstrated no effect of cross-linguistic syntactic influence for features of the core syntax during processing only in English unless the bilinguals are primed with Spanish syntactic structure prior to their judgment. Conversely, these bilinguals demonstrate interference from English on to Spanish without priming, an effect that appears to be the result of on-line influences rather than a reflection of their permanent, Spanish representation. Overall, the adult results indicate the existence of two separate syntactic systems in which cross-linguistic influence is determined by the situation. |
