Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An on-line gating method was used to investigate Chinese-English bilinguals' performance in a grammaticality judgment task. Evidence of different transfer patterns (i.e., backward and forward transfer in early and late second language acquisition) was found in the data reported here. There were strong and systematic relations between performance on the judgments of grammaticality and a separate sentence interpretation task. However, there is also some evidence that inter-language transfer or interference occurs earlier in acquisition for the judgment task than for the sentence interpretation. Judgments of wellformedness might be one of the first domains to "soften" when one language comes into contact with another. Furthermore, it is possible that Chinese and English are more "inter-penetrable" for both forward and backward transfer between these two languages than has been observed between any two language types to date.