214Juggling Two Grammars
Eirini Sanoudaki and Guillaume Thierry
Introduction
Humans have the ability to acquire two or more languages, which may
differ radically from each other in terms of their syntactic rules. An example
of this cross-linguistic variation is the order in which adjectives and nouns
can appear. In a given language the order may be fixed, for example adjec-
tive–noun (blue car), or noun–adjective (car blue), or it may vary (blue car or car
blue). Three languages that exemplify this type of variation are English,
Welsh and French:
(1) a. English
blue car (adjective + noun)
b. Welsh
car glas (noun + adjective) car blue ‘blue car’
c. French
voiture bleue (noun + adjective) car blue ‘blue car’
but
belle voiture (adjective + noun) beautiful car ‘beautiful car’
or
voiture belle (noun + adjective) car beautiful ‘beautiful car’
Yet, strikingly, a bilingual individual who has acquired two languages
during childhood can comprehend and produce sentences that conform to
either of his/her two grammars, whichever is required, in what is perceived
by his/her interlocutors as a fine monolingual interaction. In fact, in mono-
lingual interactions, interlocutors may be entirely unaware of the bilingual’s
knowledge of a second language.
Interlocutors’ perception, however, does not necessarily reveal anything
about the neural implementation of grammatical processing, and the ques-
tion of whether bilinguals indeed function like monolinguals during syntac-
tic processing of one of their languages remains open. It could be the case
that grammatical processing in a bilingual is essentially similar to that of a