PMID- 30405466
OWN - NLM
STAT- PubMed-not-MEDLINE
LR  - 20231004
IS  - 1664-1078 (Print)
IS  - 1664-1078 (Electronic)
IS  - 1664-1078 (Linking)
VI  - 9
DP  - 2018
TI  - How Do French-English Bilinguals Pull Verb Particle Constructions Off? Factors 
      Influencing Second Language Processing of Unfamiliar Structures at the 
      Syntax-Semantics Interface.
PG  - 1885
LID - 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01885 [doi]
LID - 1885
AB  - An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms 
      underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are 
      comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle 
      constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 
      English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a 
      non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined 
      structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English 
      proficiency can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of VPCs 
      (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, 
      the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb (e.g., The 
      professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is 
      long (e.g., The professor looked the student's last name up). This shifted 
      structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. 
      We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals' reading time (RT) patterns 
      would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 
      2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French-English bilinguals were 
      tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic 
      knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with 
      VPCs that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers' reading 
      dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object 
      noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, 
      NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by 
      participants' English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with 
      shorter RTs. Examining participants' explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and 
      working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high 
      working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. 
      Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual 
      processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the 
      principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with 
      theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 
      modulated by processing difficulty.
FAU - Herbay, Alexandre C
AU  - Herbay AC
AD  - School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 
      Canada.
AD  - Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Montreal, QC, Canada.
FAU - Gonnerman, Laura M
AU  - Gonnerman LM
AD  - School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 
      Canada.
AD  - Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Montreal, QC, Canada.
FAU - Baum, Shari R
AU  - Baum SR
AD  - School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montreal, QC, 
      Canada.
AD  - Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Montreal, QC, Canada.
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
DEP - 20181017
PL  - Switzerland
TA  - Front Psychol
JT  - Frontiers in psychology
JID - 101550902
PMC - PMC6202929
OTO - NOTNLM
OT  - bilingualism
OT  - lexical knowledge
OT  - native-like processing
OT  - phrasal verbs
OT  - second language sentence processing
OT  - syntax-semantic interface
OT  - verb-particle constructions
OT  - working memory
EDAT- 2018/11/09 06:00
MHDA- 2018/11/09 06:01
PMCR- 2018/10/17
CRDT- 2018/11/09 06:00
PHST- 2018/04/23 00:00 [received]
PHST- 2018/09/14 00:00 [accepted]
PHST- 2018/11/09 06:00 [entrez]
PHST- 2018/11/09 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2018/11/09 06:01 [medline]
PHST- 2018/10/17 00:00 [pmc-release]
AID - 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01885 [doi]
PST - epublish
SO  - Front Psychol. 2018 Oct 17;9:1885. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01885. eCollection 
      2018.