Resumen de Bilingual strategies from the perspective of a processing model

Robert J. Hartsuiker

• Muysken argues for four general “strategies” that characterize language contact phenomena across several levels of description. These strategies are (A) maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); (B) maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); (C) match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and (D) use universal language processing principles. These strategies are seen as choices that bilingual speakers make, individually and collectively, and that are influenced by multiple social, individual, and linguistic factors. This account has the clear advantage of unifying a seemingly very diverse set of language contact phenomena using a limited set of principles. One such phenomenon is cross-linguistic structural priming, the tendency of bilingual speakers to copy grammatical structures from a language recently used to another language (e.g., Hartsuiker, Pickering & Veltkamp, 2004), which Muysken considers an example of “bilingual interference”. In this domain, I will explore how these strategies can be realized in terms of a psycholinguistic processing model, and whether these strategies can be reduced to even more basic principles.