The Scope of Bilingual Sentence Planning in L1 and L2 : Effects of Complexity and Bilingual Profile

Abstract

Investigating the scope of bilingual sentence planning, this two-component study compared first and second language sentence production at different complexity level sin relation to aspects of bilingual profile. Norwegian-English bilinguals filled out a questionnaire detailing their language background and proficiency in both languages, after which they performed a sentence production task in each language, producing prepositional-structure and coordinate-structure sentences at varying levels of complexity. The results of the study revealed that first and second language planning operates with different planning scopes. Prior to speech onset, the scope of first language sentence-level encoding encompasses only the first functional phrase in the sentence, while in the second language the entire subject phrase is grammatically encoded. Additionally, the results showed that planning scope in the first language may be broken up by adding an adjective to the initial noun phrase of a coordinate structure, in which case only the first noun phrase is grammatically encoded prior to speech onset. Furthermore, a relationship was found between high English proficiency and shorter production latencies in English, as well as indications of a link between high English proficiency and adjective retrieval difficulties in Norwegian. Altogether, this study provides evidence for the two languages of a bilingual employing different planning scopes and strategies.