Abstract for Eva Fernandez's talk

Bilingual and monolingual prosody in Spanish and English: Similarities and differences, and implications for sentence processing
Eva Fernandez (CUNY Graduate Center)
May 3, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Can bilinguals achieve native-like prosody in both of their languages? Does one system always dominate? Or does bilingual prosody in both languages diverge substantially from monolingual patterns? I will present data collected from Spanish-English bilinguals in three proficiency categories: English-dominant, Spanish-dominant, balanced.

The bilinguals performed in a task identical to that used in an earlier study (Fernandez et al. 2003, Fernandez & Bradley, 2004), which identified both similarities and differences in the prosodies of monolingual speakers of the two languages. The prosody produced by the bilinguals resembles that produced by their monolingual counterparts, but only in part. The English-dominant and some of the balanced bilinguals closely approach the patterns of the monolinguals. The Spanish-dominant and some of the balanced bilinguals, however, failed to achieve monolingual-like patterns in English, and some also in Spanish. I will discuss a number of implications of these findings for on-going investigations of cross-linguistic differences in sentence processing.

References

Fernandez, E. M. & Bradley, D. (2004). Exploring the prosody of the RC attachment construction in English and Spanish. Poster presented at the 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 25-27, College Park, MD.

Fernandez, E.M., Bradley, D., Igoa, J.M. & Teira, C. (2003). Prosodic phrasing in the RC-attachment ambiguity: Effects of language, RC-length, and position. Paper presented at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP) 2003, August 25-27, Glasgow, Scotland, UK