Supporting Evidence from Categorical Data

Abstract

The studies presented in the previous two chapters of the book measured perceived-well-formedness of sentences regarding the two interfaces and provided solid findings. Taking the claims of the studies that have investigated the cognitive aspects of bilingualism into consideration, it is reasonable to raise the question as to whether the bilingual speakers showed higher sensitivity to the semantic and pragmatic constraints because the grammaticality judgment task encouraged them to do so and provided them with sufficient means to express themselves freely. Indeed, previous research suggested that bilingual speakers develop a higher degree of metalinguistic awareness, which can be defined as ‘explicit knowledge of linguistic structure and the ability to access it intentionally’ (Bialystok 1979, 1982; Bialystok et al. 2004, 2007). This indicates that bilingual speakers do not have higher levels of linguistic knowledge, but that they are highly capable of performing processes that require access to certain types of knowledge that might be supported by their attentional advantage in selectivity and inhibition (Bialystok 2001, Bialystok and Craik 2010). We can therefore expect the same advantages to result in success only in grammaticality judgment tasks. The question that arises at this point is whether bilinguals would perform poorer (i.e., provide random responses, or else stick to the default form) once they are forced to produce a structure, the use of which is context dependent and optional. In order to respond to this suspicion, a forced-choice experiment, which is often called as a semi-production task in the language acquisition literature, is designed to check the validity of the monolingual and bilingual data yielded by the two studies presented in Chaps. 5 and 6. As such, the experiment in this chapter ultimately aims at controlling for task effects to reach more generalizable results.