Sentence interpretation strategies in adult Dutch–English bilinguals

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Abstract
This study is concerned with the probabilistic nature of processing strategies in bilingual speakers of Dutch and English. We used a sentence interpretation task designed to set up various “coalitions” and “competitions” among a restricted set of grammatical entities (i.e., word order, animacy, agreement). Performance in English paralleled that in Dutch in large measure, but where it diverged it approached performance on similar tasks by English monolinguals (Bates et al., 1982). These findings are interpreted on the basis of the “competition model,” a probabilistic theory of grammatical processing which provides a formalism for explaining what it means for a second language user to be “between” languages.