Crosslinguistic influence in motion event processing: a self-paced reading pilot study of L1-portuguese/L2-english bilinguals

Abstract

This paper presents a pilot study1, the first phase of my ongoing postdoctoral research on conceptual transfer—a phenomenon at the intersection of second language acquisition (SLA) and the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH). The LRH posits that language can influence speakers’ perception, attention, memory and expression (Pavlenko, 2014). In bilinguals, that means that the conceptual structure of a language can affect the use of another language, a phenomenon known as conceptual transfer (Jarvis; Pavlenko, 2010). A key domain for investigating this is motion events, where typological differences between languages can make speakers attend to and express distinct elements of an event.