Abstract
We considered the language ability and processing of bilinguals by experimentally comparing them with native speakers and L2 learners. The bilingual participants were Japanese who speak both English and Japanese fluently. The native speakers and the learners were native Japanese speakers who learn English and native English speakers who learn Japanese. The stimuli were short sentences in Japanese or English that contain either a grammatical error or a lexical error. Sentences without errors were also used for distracters. Each stimulus was presented for 2 seconds in a random order. The participants were requested to answer whether the presented sentence was correct or wrong. We predicted that learners paid more attention to lexical errors and native speakers to grammatical errors, while the bilingual participants showed a similar tendency to native speakers in both languages. We discuss the language ability and processing of bilinguals based on the results.
