Failed gender agreement in L1 English L2 Spanish: Syntactic or lexical problem?

Abstract

According to representational accounts (Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004), the inability to acquire abstract syntactic features after a critical period explains L2 difficulties with gender, while according to lexical accounts (Grüter et al. 2012; Hopp 2012), gender assignment issues – the inability to assigned to a target-like class accounts for these difficulties. We explore three potential agreement cues: 1) semantic gender relating to sex (e.g. ‘girl’ vs. ‘boy’) 2) morphophonological transparency cues, and 3) syntactic agreement cues. Semantic and morphophonological cues may facilitate gender agreement only for a subset of nouns, whereas agreement cues can do so for all nouns, including opaque gender nouns that do not have semantic gender. Seventeen low proficiency and sixteen high proficiency L1 English L2 Spanish speakers and seventeen native Spanish controls judged the grammaticality of 60 experimental sentences. We compared participants’ gender agreement accuracy and reaction times (RTs) on experimental items with and without semantic gender, and with and without transparent gender morphemes. Semantic gender did not serve as a cue for gender assignment/agreement; instead, it slowed down RTs in high proficiency and control participants. Morphophonological cues significantly increased accuracy and decreased RTs in all groups. Finally, agreement cues did not seem to help low proficiency learners, since their accuracy on opaque nouns was barely above chance. This suggests that they did not effectively use agreement cues to assign gender. By contrast, high proficiency learners exhibited native-like accuracy on opaque nouns. These findings support the lexical accounts of gender agreement difficulties, against the representational accounts.

The Next Phase in Heritage Language Studies: Methodological Considerations and Advancements

“…Behavioral L2 studies revealed that higher L2 proficiency facilitated L2 prediction based on morphosyntactic associations (e.g., Sagarra et al, 2021;Henry et al, 2022;see Ito and Pickering, 2021, for a review; and see Mitsugi, 2020, for lack of proficiency effects), phonosemantic associations (Perdomo and Kaan, 2021, for bin 5), and morphophonological associations (Sagarra and Casillas, 2018). Higher L2 proficiency also benefited L2 morphosyntactic processing (see 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1141174 Frontiers in Psychology 14 frontiersin.org Kirova and Camacho, 2021, for a review), as well as L2 morphological processing (Kimppa et al, 2019), L2 word activation (Berghoff et al, 2021), and L2 phonological processing (Jun and Oh, 2000;White et al, 2015;Konishi et al, 2018;Maddah and Reiterer, 2018). Neurocognitive L2 studies indicated that higher L2 proficiency facilitated L2 morphosyntactic processing (see Alemán , for a review) and shaped the brain , allowing learners to activate the same brain areas as monolinguals (Vingerhoets et al, 2003).…”

Practice beats age: co-activation shapes heritage speakers’ lexical access more than age of onset

“…Behavioral L2 studies revealed that higher L2 proficiency facilitated L2 prediction based on morphosyntactic associations (e.g., Lew-Williams and Fernald, 2010;Dussias et al, 2013;Sagarra et al, 2021;Henry et al, 2022;see Ito and Pickering, 2021, for a review; and see Mitsugi, 2020, for lack of proficiency effects), phonosemantic associations (Perdomo and Kaan, 2021, for bin 5), and morphophonological associations (Sagarra and Casillas, 2018). Higher L2 proficiency also benefited L2 morphosyntactic processing (see 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1141174 Frontiers in Psychology 14 frontiersin.org Kirova and Camacho, 2021, for a review), as well as L2 morphological processing (Kimppa et al, 2019), L2 word activation (Berghoff et al, 2021), and L2 phonological processing (Jun and Oh, 2000;White et al, 2015;Konishi et al, 2018;Maddah and Reiterer, 2018). Neurocognitive L2 studies indicated that higher L2 proficiency facilitated L2 morphosyntactic processing (see Alemán Bañón et al, 2018, for a review) and shaped the brain (Pliatsikas et al, 2020), allowing learners to activate the same brain areas as monolinguals (Vingerhoets et al, 2003).…”