BILINGUAL SENTENCE PROCESSING: RELATIVE CLAUSE ATTACHMENT IN ENGLISH
AND SPANISH. Eva M. Fernández. Amsterdam: Benjamins,
2003. Pp. xx + 292. $118.00 cloth.
The purpose of this dissertation monograph is “to determine
whether bilinguals, with proficiencies in each of their languages
sufficient to support responsible fluency, process linguistic input by
employing the routines that are followed by monolinguals of each of
their languages” (p. 211). In other words, the question is
whether the sentence processing of bilinguals is dependent on the
language of the sentence (language dependence) or on the dominant
language of the bilingual (called language independence). The study
first identifies a sentence type with crosslinguistic processing
differences and then seeks to determine whether monolinguals and
bilinguals process those sentences differently in online (early phase)
and offline (postsyntactic) tests.