Dowens, M. G. 1, 2, 4 , Guo, T. 3 , Guo, J. 3 , Barber, H. 4 & Carreiras, M. 2, 5, 6
1 Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics, UNNC, Ningbo, China
2 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain
3 State Key Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, BNU, China
4 University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
5 Ikerbasque. Basque Foundation for Science
6 Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea - Universidad del País Vasco
In the area of bilingual syntax processing, age of proficiency (AoA) has been considered the most important factor affecting processing. However, there has been recent evidence for the importance of several other factors, including the degree of proficiency attained, L1-L2 typological overlap and feature similarity and the possibility of transfer from the L1. The relative importance of these factors and the nature of L1–L2 transfer, however, are still unclear. In a previous event-related potentials (ERP) study with English L1 high proficiency late learners of Spanish, (Gillon-Dowens, Vergara, Barber, & Carreiras, 2010) the electrical brain activity of participants was recorded while they read Spanish sentences containing violations of number and grammatical gender agreement. Results included an ERP pattern of Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) followed by P600, with, however, differences between gender and number processing in contrast to native speaker controls, thus indicating possible transfer effects for number processing, as this is a grammatical feature of English while gender processing is not. In the present study, we recruited a group of highly-proficient Chinese L1 late learners of Spanish. Unlike Spanish and English, in Mandarin Chinese neither gender nor number is computed and so the ERP results from this group can help to clarify the role of L1-L2 transfer in morpho-syntax processing routines. Participants read sentences containing gender and number violations and performed a syntactic judgment task while ERPs were recorded. The results for the Chinese L1 group included a P600 effect which was similar to the native Spanish readers and different from the English L1 late learners, in that there were no differences between gender and number processing. The results are taken to be evidence for L1-L2 transfer effects and discussed in the light of current models of L2 processing.