Shared argument structure among bilinguals: Evidence from sentence reading and recall

This study contributes to investigations of whether language-specific syntactic structures are shared by bilinguals while processing sentences in one of their languages (Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004). We report a case in which bilingualism influences L1 performance, focusing on an argument structure pattern that differs between Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and English: the induced action alternation of English manner-of-motion verbs. This is a causative construction applying to a particular sub-set of motion verbs (Levin, 1993), licensing sentences such as (1)—ungrammatical in BP (1’) and Spanish (Montrul, 2001; Souza, 2011). (1) The French captain marched his soldiers to the capital. (1’) * O capitão francês marchou seus soldados até a capital. The task performed by bilinguals in L1 was a combination sentence-recall/sentence-matching procedure. Whole sentences were presented for silent reading, arranged on a single line, center-screen. A button press extinguished the sentence and prompted participants to recall orally the sentence just read. An second button press immediately revealed a new sentence on which a matching judgment was made. Materials included sentences with causative-like structure (NP-V-NP-PP) instantiating the induced action construction with manner-of-motion verbs (1), transitive change-of-state verbs like (2), and intransitive verbs (pseudocausatives) like (3). (2) The young actresses dried their dresses at the theater