In an eye-movement monitoring experiment, proficient Spanish-English bilingual participants read English sentences containing subject and object relative clauses. Animacy of nouns within the experimental sentences was also manipulated to investigate the effect of semantic cues on sentence processing. Eighteen participants read sentences while eye tracking equipment monitored the movements of their eye and recorded data on fixation times in critical regions within each sentence. It was found that the bilingual participants, much like monolingual participants in previous studies, used both semantic and syntactic cues when processing English relative clauses. These findings suggest that L2 language processing in proficient bilinguals may be qualitatively similar to language processing in monolinguals.
