How Bilingualism Affects Syntactic Processing in The Native Language

Abstract

In this chapter, we survey recent contributions to the research on bilingual language processing that demonstrate how exposure to a second language, even for a brief period of time, can impact processing in the native language. We focus our discussion primarily on syntactic and morpho-syntactic processing. In light of this evidence, we argue that claims of language attrition may not be as clear-cut as one may think when online language processing is taken into account. A second goal of our chapter is to show that eye-tracking is a premier behavioural method by which we can come to understand fine-grained changes in online language processing. In doing so, we hope to illustrate how the study of online language processing via eye-tracking can help to clarify issues in language attrition.