Harald Clahsen – Universität Potsdam, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
Late bilinguals are people who have learnt a new language as adults or in late childhood. Psycholinguists have recently begun to investigate how late bilinguals comprehend and process language in real time. This talk will present some recent findings from this line of research focusing on the processing of sentences and morphologically complex words, e.g. inflected and derived words that consist of stems and affixes. I will argue that although late bilinguals can become native-like in some linguistic domains, differences persist in the domain of complex grammar, even in highly proficient late bilinguals.