Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Matias Morales Martinez.

Title: Conceptualization of motion events in fluent bilinguals: evidence from language production.

Abstract: Talmy (2000) proposes a typological distinction on how components of motions events are encoded differently across languages. In particular, those languages that commonly represent manner information in the main verb of a sentence (e.g. run) are called satellite-framed languages, whereas those that typically encode path information in the same position (e.g. enter) are called verb-framed languages. A question that arises is how bilinguals would select and encode this information when speaking in a L2 that is typologically different from their L1. I will present two experiments that examine this question. In experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals freely described highly constrained motion events in their L2 (English) showing a pattern separated from the one presented by L1 Spanish speakers and similar to that obtained in L1 English speakers. In experiment two, Spanish-English bilinguals were conceptually primed with either path or manner verbs using the same description paradigm and results suggest that bilinguals speaking in their L2 were equally insensitive to path primes than native speakers.