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Article published In: The Acquisition and Processing of Spanish and Portuguese Morphosyntax: Theoretical and experimental issues
Edited by Rachel Klassen, Anahí Alba de la Fuente, Joanne Markle LaMontagne and Almudena Basanta y Romero-Valdespino
[Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 29:2] 2016
► pp. 523–543

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The processing of gender assignment in Spanish

Does canonicity have an effect on Basque speakers?

 | Mondragon Unibertsitatea
Published online: 2 February 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.29.2.06ima
This paper reports on an experiment investigating the processing of accurate gender assignment in canonical and non-canonical inanimate nouns in Spanish by native speakers of Basque with nativelike proficiency in Spanish. 33 Basque/Spanish bilinguals and 32 native speakers of Spanish completed an online and an offline gender assignment task. Participants assigned gender to inanimate nouns with canonical (-o; -a) and non-canonical word endings (-e; consonants). The results revealed that the Basque/Spanish bilingual group obtained high accuracy scores in both tasks, similar to the Spanish native speaker group. Interestingly, unlike the Spanish group, the Basque speakers showed faster reaction times with feminine nouns than masculine ones. Canonicity seems to be a strong cue for both groups, since all participants were more accurate and faster with canonical word endings. Even though quantitatively Basque/Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals’ gender assignment accuracy rates do not differ, qualitatively, the Basque/Spanish bilinguals’ assignment patterns seem to differ somewhat from those of the native Spanish speakers.
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2023. Aprendentes espanhóis de Português língua estrangeira: atribuição de género gramatical em palavras sufixadas. Estudos de Lingüística Galega DOI logo
Munarriz-Ibarrola, Amaia, Maria-José Ezeizabarrena, Varun DC Arrazola & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2022. Gender assignment strategies and L1 effects in the elicited production of mixed Spanish-Basque DPs. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 12:6 ► pp. 778 ff. DOI logo
Pérez-Tattam, Rocío, Maria José Ezeizabarrena, Hans Stadthagen-González & Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole
2019. Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children. Languages 4:3 ► pp. 58 ff. DOI logo

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