Research Symposium

BIO

Jennifer Teixeira-Olivera is a second-year student in the Behavioral Neuroscience major and Chinese minor. Once finished with her undergraduate studies, Jennifer plans to apply to graduate school in order to expand her knowledge on the subject of Neuroscience and progress into the field of research.

Ambiguous relative clause attachment and language mode in bilingual Spanish-English speakers

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to examine the relationship between ambiguous relative clause attachment and language mode in bilingual Spanish-English speakers. Many single-language studies have indicated that particular languages, like English (Cuetos & Don C. , 1988), Spanish (Carreiras & Clifton, 1993), and Greek (Papadopoulou & Clahsen, 2003), the users of these languages are more likely to use specific attachment preferences. For example, English is typically low attachment, while Spanish and Greek is usually high attachment. This is can be typically attributed in single language studies to the variance in cross-lingually(Grillo & Costa, 2014). However, more recent Bilingual studies have introduced new uninvestigated elements, like code-switching, that suggests that there are more factors at play(Couto & Gullberg, M., 2019). Overall, this project aims to examine these factors as it relates to the interpretation of the ambiguous relative clause, by Spanish-English Bilinguals. 

Keywords: Linguistics, Spanish-English, Bilingual Code-switching, Relative Ambiguous Clause