Eva M Fernández

• Queens College, CUNY

This paper explores how stories of everyday experiences in urban settings from around the world foster and sustain a community that seemingly transcends national borders. Given that both urban and online experiences are increasingly prevalent in modern life, surprisingly little attention is paid to how these experiences might foster a sense of comm...

The study of bilingualism has charted a dramatically new, important, and exciting course in the 21st C., benefiting from the integration in cognitive science of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology (especially work on the higher-level cognitive processes often called "executive function" or "executive control"). Curr...

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish–English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry—cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing—in order to support...

Sustained interaction between a bilingual's two languages can be a first step toward diachronic language change. We describe two investigations that explore this by examining how bilinguals process innovative syntactic structures in their first language. In the first investigation, a sentence recall/sentence matching task, bilinguals and monolingua...

This chapter examines off-line and on-line methodologies used to study bilinguals. We demonstrate how methodological choices in experimental design are linked to the theoretical frameworks within which the research is cast. We illustrate how to identify appropriate methodological paradigms drawing from research on the integration of languages in bi...

Many studies have investigated the attachment of relative clauses (RCs) modifying complex noun phrases (NPs). Cross-language differences in how ambiguous RCs are interpreted have been attributed to a number of factors, among which lexical semantics and prosody seem to play a special role. We report data from an experiment conducted in English using...

The casual observer of the student population at Queens College (an urban, public, predominantly undergraduate campus) is awed by the ubiquity of technology, offering students the ability to communicate and participate in learning anytime, anywhere. They text, email, facebook, and tweet all day long. They have nearly instant access to the digital t...

This chapter offers an overview of an initiative at Queens College designed to engage faculty in productive conversations about academic discourse as we understand and practice it. We begin with a general definition of academic discourse, followed by illustrations of the specific challenges that discourse conventions and technical language present...

We present a novel method for establishing the preferred interpretation of ambiguities in spoken sentences. It makes use of the phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970): when noise replaces phoneme(s) in a word, listeners report that they perceive the word as intact and congruent with the context. If the word disambiguates a potentially ambiguous...

This volume is the first dedicated to the growing field of theory and research on second language processing and parsing. The fourteen papers in this volume offer cutting-edge research using a number of different languages (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, English) and structures (e.g., relative clauses, wh-gaps, gender, number) to...

http://www.amazon.com/Developmental-Psycholinguistics-childrens-processing-Acquisition/dp/9027253056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393965593&sr=8-1&keywords=9789027253057

The Late Closure principle is tested in psycholinguistic Experiment I with 2x2 factor design: the length of the RC -long vs. short, and the word order -canonical vs. scrambled. The results indicate that Bulgarian patterns with other Slavic languages to attach 'high' (59% in total). Our Bulgarian data provide some initial support for the Implicit Pr...

This study presents new data about the cross-language application of the Late Closure principle (Frazier, 1978), whose universality was put in question by data from Spanish (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). Using sentences containing a restrictive relative clause unambiguously modifying the first or the second noun of a complex NP (os cúmplices do ladrão/...

Esta investigação compara a prosódia produzida no espanhol e no inglês por falantes bilíngües e falantes monolíngües, em enunciados de sentenças-alvo contendo ambigüidade decorrente do encaixamento de oração relativa. Os dados de falantes bilíngües assemelham-se aos padrões monolíngües em aspectos de construção de frases e entonação, mas se diferen...

BILINGUAL SENTENCE PROCESSING: RELATIVE CLAUSE ATTACHMENT IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH. Eva M. Fernández. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xx + 292. $118.00 cloth. The purpose of this dissertation monograph is “to determine whether bilinguals, with proficiencies in each of their languages sufficient to support responsible fluency, process linguistic input...

Correlatos funcionales de respuesta cerebral en la Resolución de Adjunción de Oraciones de Relativo Ambiguas

To refine existing explanations of the cross-linguistic differences in RC attachment • An early preference for low attachment in Spanish (guided, e.g., by Late Closure), compared to the well-documented preference for high attachment obtained with untimed questionnaire tasks, would suggest that the cross-linguistic variation is sourced extra-syntact...

The RC Attachment Ambiguity: N1-Prep-N2-RC +“Off-line” studies have generated replicable results: cross-linguistic differences, just about always +“On-line” studies have merely muddled the picture: cross-linguistic differences, only sometimes! Q1: Are there different preferences in RC attachment “off-line” and “on-line”? Q2: When number agreement f...

The cross-linguistic differences documented in studies of relative clause attachment offer an invaluable opportunity to examine a particular aspect of bilingual sentence processing: Do bilinguals process their two languages as if they were monolingual speakers of each? This volume provides a review of existing research on relative clause attachment...

This chapter presents evidence from a group of experiments comparing the perceptual strategies employed by Spanish-English bilinguals to those used by their monolingual counterparts. The data show that language history affects the way readers assign structure to ambiguous syntactic constituents, but in different ways off-line and on-line. Off-line,...

Language dependency in parsing results when the parsing strategies used by bilinguals depend on the language of the input, in the case that cross-linguistic differences in processing exist. If bilingual parsing is language independent, on the other hand, bilinguals will process all input using the same strategies - those of L1, those of L2, or an a...

Prosody exerts a force on the process of computing the syntactic structure of a string of words, not only when it is available as part of the signal (Carlson, Clifton & Frazier, 2001, among others), but also when it is only projected mentally during silent reading (Fodor, 2002). I will discuss how the visual presentation of text might affect the pr...