@article{ReifegersteJarvisFelser2020,
  author    = {Reifegerste, Jana and Jarvis, Rebecca and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing},
  series = {Journal of memory and language},
  volume    = {111},
  journal   = {Journal of memory and language},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam [u.a.]},
  issn      = {0749-596X},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jml.2019.104083},
  pages     = {23},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers' RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers' RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers' accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers'. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities).},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{PanedaLagoVaresetal.2020,
  author    = {Pa{\~n}eda, Claudia and Lago, Sol and Vares, Elena and Ver{\´i}ssimo, Jo{\~a}o Marques and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Island effects in Spanish comprehension},
  series = {Glossa : a journal of general linguistics},
  volume    = {5},
  journal   = {Glossa : a journal of general linguistics},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Open Library of Humanities},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {2397-1835},
  doi       = {10.5334/gjgl.1058},
  pages     = {30},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.},
  language  = {en}
}