Language Sciences Colloquium – Cho

Second language processing of pragmatic inferences

Jacee Cho

English, Language Sciences

University of Wisconsin – Madison

With an increasing number of bi-/multilingual speakers in the world, researchers have paid much attention to similarities and differences in monolingual vs. bilingual language processing. One recent proposal about bilingualism effects on language processing is Sorace’s (2003, 2011) Interface Hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that bilingual speakers are more likely to show divergent behaviors at interfaces where multiple types of information across different domains are integrated. An example of such an area is the semantics-pragmatics interface where pragmatic inferences are computed. In this talk, I first review previous studies on pragmatic inference processing in two types of bilinguals, bilingual children and adult second language (L2) speakers, in comparison with their monolingual peers. I then present data from my recent self-paced reading study on native and L2 speakers’ online processing of inferences related to the quantifier some as in Some elephants have trunks (inference: Not all elephants have trunks).