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Article published In: Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 1:1 (2018) ► pp.5–30

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Grammatical gender processing in L2 speakers of Spanish

The role of cognate status and gender transparency

 | The Pennsylvania State University
 | University of Florida
 | The Pennsylvania State University
Published online: 7 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.17023.hal
Abstract
Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns (e.g., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 181, 193–198. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Dussias, P. E., Valdés Kroff, J. R., Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 351, 353–387. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Conversely, adult second language (L2) learners for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language appear to need near-native proficiency to behave like native speakers (Dussias, P. E., Valdés Kroff, J. R., Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 351, 353–387. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Hopp, H. (2013). Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability. Second Language Research, 291, 33–56. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The question addressed here is whether sensitivity to grammatical gender in L2 learners of Spanish is modulated by the cognate status of nouns due to their heightened parallel orthographic, phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic activation. Additionally, the role of transparent and non-transparent word-final gender marking cues was examined because past studies have shown that native speakers of Spanish are sensitive to differences in gender transparency (Caffarra, S., Janssen, N., & Barber, H. A. (2014). Two sides of gender: ERP evidence for the presence of two routes during gender agreement processing. Neuropsychologia, 631, 124–134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Participants were English learners of Spanish and Spanish monolingual speakers. Data were collected using the visual world paradigm. Participants saw 2-picture visual scenes in which objects either matched in gender (same-gender trials) or mismatched (different-gender trials). Targets were embedded in the preamble Encuentra el/la ___ ‘Find the ___’. The monolingual group displayed an anticipatory effect on different gender trials, replicating past studies that show that native speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in prenominal modifiers predictively. The learners were able to use gender information on the articles to facilitate processing, but only when the nouns had gender endings that were transparent. Cognate status did not confer an advantage during grammatical gender processing.
Article outline
  • Experiment 1: Processing the grammatical gender of cognates
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials and design
      • Procedure
      • Results
    • Monolingual Spanish speakers
      • Repeated-measures ANOVA
      • Time course analysis
    • English-Spanish speakers
      • Repeated-measures ANOVA
      • Time course analysis
  • Experiment 2: Processing transparently marked grammatical gender
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials and design
      • Procedure
      • Results
    • Monolingual Spanish speakers
      • Repeated-measures ANOVA
      • Time course analysis
    • English-Spanish speakers
      • Repeated-measures ANOVA
      • Time course analysis
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note
  • References
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