Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish

Abstract

This paper reports on an experiment investigating the acquisition of Spanish, a language that has a gender feature for nouns and gender agreement for determiners and adjectives, by speakers of a first language (L1) that also has gender (French), as well as an L1 that does not (English). Number (present in all three languages) is also investigated. Subjects were adult learners of Spanish, at three levels of proficiency, as well as a control group of native speakers. Oral production data were elicited. Subjects were also tested on an interpretation task, in which the selection of pictures corresponding to particular sentences depends on number and gender contrasts. The results from both tasks show significant effects for proficiency; low proficiency groups differ significantly from native speakers, but advanced and intermediate groups do not. There were no significant effects for L1 or for prior exposure to another second language with gender. The findings are discussed in the context of two different theories as to the possibility of parameter resetting in nonnative acquisition, namely, the failed functional features hypothesis and the full transfer full access hypothesis. The results are consistent with the latter hypothesis.

Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data.

“…These results are similar to previous studies that have examined the production of number agreement in L1-English L2-Spanish learners at similar levels of proficiency (e.g., Franceschina, 2005;White et al, 2004).…”

“…For number, learners were more accurate rejecting feature clash than default errors (e.g., in line with McCarthy, 2008), but they showed the reverse pattern for gender (contra McCarthy, 2008 andWhite et al, 2004).…”

“…These results are at odds with previous L2 studies on gender. For example, Montrul et al, (2008) examined gender agreement in spoken production in a group of adult L1-English L2-Spanish learners, and found a higher error rate with feminine than masculine nouns (i.e., more default errors) both at the level of syntactic gender agreement and lexical gender assignment (see also Grüter et al, 2012) (2008) and White et al (2004). In both studies, L2 learners showed higher error rates with feminine than masculine nouns (i.e., more default errors), although this asymmetry was especially characteristic of learners at the intermediate level of proficiency, not so much of advanced learners.…”

“…For novel properties, it is argued that L2ers use compensatory strategies. With respect to the acquisition of grammatical gender by speakers of gender-free languages, one potential strategy would be phonological rhyming between noun endings and inflectional forms (Hawkins, 2001;White et al, 2004). This position is well represented by the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou, 2007), for which it is novel syntactic features (i.e., those which make no semantic contribution to the interpretation of a lexical item) that become Examining Morphological Variability in L2 Learners 8 inaccessible in adult L2 acquisition.…”

Differences in use without deficiencies in competence: passives in the Turkish and German of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany

“…One would not only expect them to have difficulties in producing agreement between a head noun and an adjective. They might, for example, be less sensitive or insensitive to secondary comprehension effects of gender (e.g., nominal ellipsis (n-drop) licensed by gender, see White et al 2004) and/or exhibit reduced sensitivity to grammatical cues/violations when processing gender (e.g., reduced markedness effects between default and non-default gender, see Alemán Bañón and Rothman 2016;Alemán Bañón, Miller and Rothman, in press). If, however, HSs only show differences in the production of gender agreement, and especially do so with particular empirical measures (offline, but less so online), then concluding that a representation is incomplete or attrited is premature.…”