Processing ser and estar to locate objects and eventsAn ERP study with L2 speakers of Spanish

  1. Dussias, Paola E.
  2. Contemori, Carla
  3. Román, Patricia
Revista:
Revista española de lingüística aplicada

ISSN: 0213-2028

Año de publicación: 2014

Volumen: 27

Volumen: 1

Páginas: 54-86

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.1075/RESLA.27.1.03DUS DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Otras publicaciones en: Revista española de lingüística aplicada

Resumen

In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as ‘to be’). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the different types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of ‘object/event + estar/ser’ permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar; event + ser) and incorrect (object + ser; event + estar) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while ‘object + ser’ constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, ‘event + estar’ combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word ‘en’ showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La fiesta es en la cocina). This P600 effect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La fiesta está en la cocina), the findings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were significantly less accurate than native speakers in all conditions, while the advanced speakers only differed from the natives in the event+ser and event+estar conditions. For the ERPs, the beginning learners did not show any effects in the time-windows under analysis. The advanced speakers showed a pattern similar to that of native speakers: (1) a P600 response to ‘object + ser’ violation more central and frontally distributed, and (2) a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms for ‘event + estar’ violation. Findings for the advanced speakers suggest that behavioral methods commonly used to assess grammatical knowledge in the L2 may be underestimating what L2 speakers have actually learned

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Patricia Román is currently a post-doctoral research associate at the Center for Language Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Granada (Spain) where she focused on studying inhibitory control in memory and language selection. After that, she was awarded with a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government to work at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig). Her research is centered on the behavioral and neural correlates of sentence processing in bilinguals and the mechanisms that deal with the specificities of bilingualism in language processing compared to monolinguals.

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