age-related effects on.pdf

Age-Related Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in First and Second Languages: Evidence from Korean-English Bilinguals1 Jeeyoung Ahn Ha University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1. Introduction One of the major questions that have intrigued researchers of language processing is the universality of language processor—are sentence processing operations universal or language- specific? Recent work on sentence processing of relative clause (RC) attachment preferences (e.g., Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony) has revealed clear cross-linguistic variation as well as differences in parsing in bilinguals and monolinguals (e.g., Cuetos Mitchell, 1988; Dussias, 2003; Fernandez, 1999; Papadopoulou Clahsen, 2003). These cross-linguistic parsing variations constitute primary evidence that some, if not all, aspects of parsing need to be learned. This poses additional problems for language learners because they not only have to acquire the representational knowledge of the target language but also the native-like ways to process sentences. One of the major issues dealt with in research on bilingual language acquisition is the question of language separation. A related question can be asked here; can bilinguals acquire distinct sentence processing strategies when their languages show parsing variations? Other related questions that naturally follow from the previous issues are the variables associated with the development of sentence processor. Similarly to first and second language acquisition studies, it seems reasonable to expect the effect of language-specific properties and learner-based variables in the due process. One variable of such interest is the age at which a bilingual has been exposed to the target language. In other words, would there be age-related effects on the development of language processor as on grammatical acquisition? Nevertheless, there is little data on the relationship of this variable to R