title: More than a mere sequence: predictive processing ofwh-dependencies in early bilinguals.
abstract: The purpose of the present study was to determine whether early bilingual Basque-Spanish speakers, who acquired Spanish by the age of 5, comprehend Spanishwh-dependences as effortlessly as native Spanish speakers. Given that Basque and Spanish are structurally different languages, we hypothesized that predictive processing strategies from the first language (L1) would interfere with predictive processing strategies in the second language (L2). More specifically, since Basque overtly marks the semantic role of agent/subject position, whereas Spanish overtly marks the role of patient/object position, we looked at whether the difference in overt marking of semantic roles would affect comprehension of subjectvs. objectquien"who" andqué"which" direct and embedded questions as well as subjectvs. object relative clauses introduced byqué. The main finding of the study is that overall early Basque-Spanish bilinguals needed more time for the comprehension ofwh-dependencies in Spanish compared to native Spanish speakers, as indicated by statistically significant group differences in response times in 9 out of 10 conditions. The results of this exploratory study indicate that a difference in overt marking of semantic roles between the two languages affects the ease of processing of Spanishwh-dependencies in early Basque-Spanish bilinguals, interfering with their ability to make native-like predictions in L2.
authors.affiliation: University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Vitoria & IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.
authors.forename: Vanja
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kljajevic
keywords: Basque language; Bilingualism; Comprehension; Predictive processing; Spanish language; Syntactic cueing; wh-dependencies