Syntactic ambiguity resolution in Jordanian Arabic–English bilinguals: Evidence for cross-linguistic influence and proficiency effects

The present study investigates relative clause attachment preferences among 43 Jordanian Arabic-English bilinguals and compares them with two control groups: 33 monolingual Jordanian Arabic speakers and 27 native English speakers. The bilingual participants completed the interpretation tasks in both languages, whereas the monolingual groups completed the task only in their native language. The results show a clear preference for high attachment in Jordanian Arabic, and a shift toward low attachment in English. Higher English proficiency was associated with fewer high-attachment responses in both languages, which points to an effect of cross-linguistic influence. The outcomes support the tendency for languages with flexible word order to favor high attachment while languages with rigid word order tend to favor low attachment. The results further indicate that syntactic processing in bilinguals is dynamic and modulated by L2 experience, providing evidence for L2-to-L1 transfer and challenging accounts that posit adult L2 learners exhibit shallow or inconsistent syntactic processing in the L2, even at higher proficiency levels. This work contributes to our understanding of bilingual parsing strategies and highlights the role of proficiency as a key factor that influences syntactic preferences.