Eyetracking evidence for heritage speakers’ access to abstract syntactic agreement features in real-time processing

Fuchs, Zuzanna

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.960376

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…Learning the first language from auditory input in childhood requires the detection and segmentation of determiners and nouns from the acoustic signal (Lew-Williams and Fernald 2007b; Wicha et al 2004), leading child learners and adult native speakers to use the grammatical information in determiners to predict the noun referent based on the gender of the determiner (Lew-Williams and Fernald 2007a). Using the same paradigm, Fuchs (2022) also showed that Spanish heritage speakers use the gender of determiners predictively to anticipate nouns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…In their studies of sentence processing using the Visual World paradigm, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007a, 2007b found that both adult native Spanish speakers and 3-4-year-old Spanish-speaking children used gender information in determiners to predict the referents of nouns during spoken word recognition on different-gender trials. In recent processing experiments, Fuchs (2021Fuchs ( , 2022 found that heritage Spanish speakers, like the native speaker controls, used gender information on definite articles (masculine and feminine alike) to predict upcoming nouns during online auditory sentence comprehension.…”

Section: Non-transparent Exceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Role of Language Experience in the Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement: A Study with Nonce Nouns

Montrul,

Mason,

Armstrong

2024

Languages

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Why is learning the gender of nouns so difficult for some bilinguals? We test the hypothesis that different language learning backgrounds or life experience with Spanish determine how learners follow different morphosyntactic cues for gender assignment in Spanish by testing learners with early and late language experience in an experiment with invented nouns. A total of 44 monolingually raised native speakers, 44 heritage speakers, and 44 L2 learners of Spanish were trained to learn 24 nonce words in Spanish presented in four input conditions that manipulated the number and type of cues to gender marking (determiner, word marker, adjective). After the learning sessions, the participants completed a word naming task, an elicited production task, and a debriefing questionnaire. The L2 learners were different than native speakers and heritage speakers in learning nonce nouns. They used morphosyntactic cues differently, relying on adjectives as their most-used strategy to assign gender, unlike native speakers and heritage speakers who used all cues. Our findings confirm processing differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers and suggest language learning background determines how learners discover reliable morphosyntactic cues to the gender of nouns in the input.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Non-transparent Exceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Language Experience in the Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement: A Study with Nonce Nouns

Montrul,

Mason,

Armstrong

2024

Languages

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“…However, besides a handful of recent studies using either self-paced reading/listening and eye-tracking, there is comparatively little available for (Spanish) HSs, and none using EEG. An eye-tracking study by Fuchs (2021Fuchs ( , 2022 compared the use of gender predictively in the visual world paradigm in adult Spanish HSs (n = 21, mean age 22.3) and a group of homeland Spanish natives. The results demonstrate that HSs make use of the definite articles el masc and la fem to predict the gender of an upcoming noun in a manner qualitatively similar to homeland natives.…”

Section: Grammatical Gender Acquisition/ Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With few exceptions (e.g., Fuchs, 2021 , 2022 ; Di Pisa et al, 2022 ), experimental evidence for grammatical gender development in heritage languages largely comes from studies using offline behavioral methods, such as spontaneous and elicited oral production and comprehension tasks. While these results demonstrate differences in HS performances in gender agreement from homeland natives, online research methods, although scarce by comparison, question any generalization regarding the vulnerability of gender in HL grammars, i.e., beyond lexical assignment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As such, examining how ERP components manifest while HSs process gender errors can offer unique insights into how their grammars are underlyingly represented and how such knowledge is deployed for processing beyond what can be understood from behavioral methods alone. Recent work using eye-tracking and self-paced reading for grammatical gender already suggests that HS processing is much less distinct from homeland natives than one might have expected from previous behavioral studies (e.g., Fuchs, 2021Fuchs, , 2022Di Pisa et al, 2022). Thus, EEG promises to at least complement, if not go beyond, such evidence, allowing a look into how HSs' brains process gender in real-time.…”

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confidence: 98%

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Morphological transparency and markedness matter in heritage speaker gender processing: an EEG study

et al. 2023

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The present study investigated the qualitative nature of grammatical gender knowledge and processing in heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish living in the United States. Forty-four adult Spanish HS bilinguals participated, completing a behavioral grammatical gender assignment task and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) while their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). The EEG GJT task included grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with grammatical gender violations on inanimate nouns, where transparency of the morpho(phono)logical cue and markedness were manipulated. The results of this study revealed that grammatical gender violations elicited the typical P600 effect across all relevant conditions, indicating that the grammatical representations and processing of grammatical gender in HSs are qualitatively similar to those in Spanish-dominant native speakers. Given the experimental manipulation in this study, these findings also suggest that both morphological transparency and markedness play significant roles in how grammatical gender is processed. However, the results of this study differ from those reported in previous studies with Spanish-dominant native speakers, as the P600 effect found was accompanied by a biphasic N400 effect. This pattern of results is interpreted as further evidence that the bilingual experience of HSs modulates certain aspects of morphosyntactic processing, particularly conferring a greater reliance on morphology. Additionally, the results of this study highlight the importance of incorporating neurolinguistic online processing methods to better understand what underlies HS bilingual competence and processing outcomes.

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Processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish: evidence from the Visual World Paradigm

Fuchs

2023

Morphology

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This paper presents a psycholinguistic study of the processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish, which has three gender categories (masculine, feminine, neuter), as well as what language-internal factors impact this processing. Results from an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm show that, during real-time language comprehension, adult monolingual speakers of Polish use cues from gender agreement on a prenominal adjective to anticipate the upcoming noun. An exploration of language-internal factors affecting this anticipatory processing finds this effect in all three genders, suggesting that encountering the relevant nominative-case agreement morpheme during language comprehension leads to automatic activation of a gender node in the mental lexicon, consistent with the literature on other languages with grammatical gender. These results hold true for the neuter agreement morpheme, despite the fact that this morpheme also instantiates default gender agreement in the language and is syncretic with the nominative plural agreement morpheme in all three genders. Further investigation finds that, while agreement morphemes for each gender prompt anticipatory processing, the reliability of a masculine agreement morpheme as a cue to gender is reduced in the presence of a neuter distractor, and vice versa. This raises questions regarding phonological proximity between the realized suffix and the suffix that would cue the distractor, with implications for the acquisition and processing of gender agreement morphology in Polish.

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Eyetracking evidence for heritage speakers’ access to abstract syntactic agreement features in real-time processing

Cited by 12 publications

References 82 publications

The Role of Language Experience in the Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement: A Study with Nonce Nouns

The Role of Language Experience in the Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement: A Study with Nonce Nouns

Morphological transparency and markedness matter in heritage speaker gender processing: an EEG study

Processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish: evidence from the Visual World Paradigm

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