Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 12:6 (2022) ► pp.845–871
Facilitative use of grammatical gender in Heritage Spanish
Published online: 15 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.20024.fuc
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.20024.fuc
Abstract
This paper presents an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm that tests whether participants are able to access gender information on definite articles and deploy it to facilitate lexical retrieval of subsequent nouns. A comparison of heritage speakers of Spanish with control monolingual speakers of Spanish suggests that the heritage speakers’ performance on this task is qualitatively similar to that of the baseline. This suggests that, despite non-target-like performance in offline tasks targeting gender production and comprehension, heritage speakers of Spanish can use gender in a target-like manner in online tasks. In line with proposals put forth by Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28(2), 191–215. and Montrul, S., Davidson, J., de la Fuente, I., & Foote, R. (2014). Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish HSs. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(01), 118–138. , a preliminary comparison with previous work on L2 learners ( (2010). Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(4), 447–464. ; Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28(2), 191–215. ; 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, 35(2), 353–387. ) provides tentative support for the idea that the nature of early language learning is crucial in developing the ability to use grammatical gender to facilitate lexical retrieval (Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28(2), 191–215. ; Montrul, S., Davidson, J., de la Fuente, I., & Foote, R. (2014). Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish HSs. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(01), 118–138. ).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Gender in Spanish
- 2.2Monolingual and bilingual acquisition of Spanish gender
- 2.3Gender in Heritage Spanish
- 2.4Facilitative use of gender in the Visual World Paradigm
- 2.5Research question
- 3.Methodology, participants & results
- 3.1Materials
- 3.2Participants
- 3.3Procedure
- 4.Analysis & results
- 4.1Oral production task
- 4.2Eye-tracking task
- 5.Discussion & implications
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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