PhD project
The Role of Lexico-Syntactic Features in Noun Phrase Production and Comprehension Insights from Spanish and Chinese in Unilingual and Bilingual Contexts
The project investigates how bilingual speakers navigate lexico-syntactic features, including grammatical gender, classifier systems, and the linear order of adjectives and nouns, across Spanish and Chinese in both unilingual and bilingual contexts.
- Duration
- 2021 - 2025
- Contact
- Ruixue Wu
The central focus of this project is on how early Spanish–Chinese bilinguals, particularly those residing in Barcelona, Spain, process and produce grammatical gender in Spanish and classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. It also examines how these bilinguals resolve syntactic conflicts arising from differences in adjective placement across the two languages, where Spanish typically places adjectives postnominally while Chinese places them prenominally. Drawing on behavioral and, where relevant, electrophysiological data, and employing a multi-task approach that integrates elicitation, repetition, and acceptability judgment tasks, this dissertation provides a comprehensive account of bilingual morphosyntactic processing in both experimental and semi-naturalistic contexts. It also sheds light on how bilinguals negotiate cross-linguistic grammatical differences during code-switching, with particular attention to gender assignment, classifier selection, and adjective placement. The findings contribute to broader discussions in bilingualism and psycholinguistics by illuminating the mechanisms through which bilinguals reconcile distinct grammatical systems in language production and comprehension.