Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21 (3), 2018, 489–504 C  Cambridge University Press 2018 doi:10.1017/S1366728917000736 Is language interference (when it occurs) a graded or an all-or-none effect? Evidence from bilingual reported speech production ∗ ANNA HATZIDAKI Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. MIKEL SANTESTEBAN Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). WOUTER DUYCK Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University. (Received: June 07, 2016; final revision received: November 22, 2017; accepted: December 08, 2017; first published online 19 January 2018) Do cross-lingual interactions occur even with structures of different word order in different languages of bilinguals? Or could the latter provide immunity to interference of the contrasting characteristics of the other language? To answer this question, we examined the reported speech production (utterances reporting what just happened; e.g., Holly asked what Eric ate) of two groups of proficient, unbalanced bilinguals with varying similarity between their native (L1-Spanish/L1-Dutch) and second language (L2-English). The results showed that both groups of bilinguals produced word order errors when formulating indirect What-questions in L2, regardless of how similar the L1 was to the L2 in that respect. Our findings suggest that in the case of reported speech production in the examined bilingual groups, cross-linguistic syntactic differences by themselves suffice to induce language interference, and that the degree of similarity between the L1 and the L2 does not seem to modulate the magnitude of this effect. Keywords: cross-linguistic syntactic differences, language interference, sentence production, bilingualism Introduction Syntactic structures across languages may often diverge, even in languages that are typologically grouped together regarding their functional and grammatical features. The intuition that cross-linguistic similarities and/or differences may be a determinant of the ease with which a certain structure can be learnt in a foreign or second language (L2), and of native-like attainment of non-native speakers, has instigated a long line of research, especially in the domains of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and applied linguistics (e.g., Ellis, 1994; Gass, 1988; Kormos, 2006; Lado, 1957; Ringbom, 2007; Schwartz, 1998). SLA studies on word order have yielded contrasting findings (see Odlin, 1990 for a critical discussion). The core issue in the present study though was not whether speakers of one language can learn a different structure in another language (see DeKeyser, 2005 for a review), but what different structures entail for ∗ This research was supported by a Special Research Fund for Visiting Foreign Researchers awarded by the Research Council of Ghent University, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (Grant No. 613465), the Basque Government (IT665-13), and the Spanish Government (MINECO: FFI2014-55733-P, RyC-2013-14722). The authors would also like to thank Maria Juncal Gutierrez Mangado for her input. Address for correspondence: Anna Hatzidaki, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of English Language and Literature, 157 84 Athens ahatzidaki@gmail.com bilingual language representation, activation, and cross- talk in unbalanced proficient bilinguals. Not so long ago, bilingual research established that users of more than one language are sensitive to properties of both language systems, regardless of whether a particular context requires use of both languages or not (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering & Veltkamp, 2004; Kroll, Sumutka & Schwartz, 2005; see Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski & Valdes-Kroff, 2012 for a review). Interestingly, the few psycholinguistic studies that have directly compared bilingual groups for production beyond the lexical level have shown that divergent syntactic properties across two languages may lead to syntactic errors when speaking one of the languages. This is true even for highly proficient bilinguals, and despite intensive corrective feedback on structures that differ cross-linguistically. For instance, Hatzidaki, Branigan and Pickering (2011) showed that subject-verb and pronoun- antecedent agreement computation is influenced by divergent number properties of a subject noun across the languages of a bilingual (Hatzidaki et al., 2011; Hatzidaki, Pickering & Branigan, 2006). Also, gender agreement in determiner-noun phrases is influenced by cross- linguistically incompatible gender systems (Lemhöfer, Spalek & Schriefers, 2008; Lemhöfer, Schriefers & Hanique, 2010). Furthermore, language interference effects are particularly evident in contexts where both https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728917000736 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universidad del Pais Vasco, on 04 Feb 2019 at 16:18:42, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at