Integrated knowledge of agreement in early and late English–Spanish bilinguals

Foote, Rebecca

doi:10.1017/s0142716410000342

Cited by 118 publications

(150 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…This may initially seem surprising, especially given that half of the conditions 12 Responses were trimmed on the basis of response time to be within two standard deviations of the mean. (Foote 2011). However, recall that target ungrammaticality is the result of a mismatch in agreement features on NP1 and ADJ, and that these two constituents are contained within a much larger frame.…”

Section: Head-noun Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies have looked at number or gender agreement in heritage speakers of Spanish, most commonly in agreement between two expressions that are adjacent (e.g., Montrul et al 2008;Foote 2011;Montrul 2013); ours is the first to apply the agreement attraction paradigm in an attempt to diagnose the structure and content of these speakers' knowledge of their agreement morphology. Building on the results of previous studies, we find it imperative to increase the difficulty in comprehension by introducing linear (as well as structural) distance between the noun bearing agreement features and the agreeing expression.…”

Section: Testing Heritage Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper investigates the morphosyntax of number and gender agreement in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish. Our study builds on the experimental paradigm of agreement attraction developed by Fuchs et al. (2015) and elicits responses to agreement failures to diagnose the potentially-independent contributions of number and gender features. By comparing the structuring of these agreement categories in native and heritage Spanish, we document a case of grammatical divergence: heritage speakers restructure their agreement categories, favoring fewer feature values and less structure. The principled nature of this restructuring demonstrates that the loss of agreement in heritage languages is not superficial or accidental, but rather follows from predictable structural changes.

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Section: Head-noun Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Testing Heritage Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Results from learners whose L1 does not encode grammatical gender, the scenario of interest in the present study, have been more mixed. Some authors have reported sensitivity to violations of gender agreement even in learners with relatively limited proficiency (Foote, 2011; Sagarra and Herschensohn, 2010; Tokowicz and MacWhinney, 2005). Keating (2009) similarly reports that advanced L2 learners of Spanish were sensitive to violations of gender agreement in a self-paced reading experiment, yet only for agreement mismatches on attributive adjectives immediately adjacent to the noun.…”

Section: Learning Grammatical Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem?

Grüter

Lew‐Williams

Fernald

2012

Second Language Research

250

240

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Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender information in real-time language use. In an experimental design that crossed production/comprehension and online/offline tasks, highly proficient L2 learners of Spanish performed at ceiling in offline comprehension, showed errors in elicited production, and exhibited weaker use of gender cues in online processing of familiar (though not novel) nouns than native speakers. These findings suggest that persistent difficulty with grammatical gender may not be limited to the realm of language production, but could affect both expressive and receptive use of language in real time. We propose that the observed differences in performance between native and non-native speakers lie at the level of lexical representation of grammatical gender and arise from fundamental differences in how infants and adults approach word learning.

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“…While Foote (2011) reported no WM effects in L2 processing of subject-verb or noun-adjective agreement, her results could be due to her participants (advanced vs. Sagarra's beginning/intermediate learners), scoring (words recalled vs. Sagarra's composite score), statistical analyses (correlations vs. Sagarra's ANCOVAs), and manipulation of distance between the agreement source and the target (distance increases syntactic complexity and Waters & Caplan's claim that WM does not affect syntactic processing).…”

Section: Working Memory and Processing Of L2 Morphology And Syntaxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working Memory in Second Language Acquisition

Sagarra¹

2012

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

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Working memory (WM) is the temporary storage and processing of incoming information needed to execute complex cognitive actions (Baddeley, 2007), such as processing a foreign language (L2). Since the 1980s, the role of WM in fi rst language (L1) processing has been investigated extensively, but only more recently has its role in L2 learning been examined keeping in mind that adult second language acquisition (SLA) requires additional computation and activation, which in turn imposes extra load on the already limited WM resources. In particular, two memory components have been considered to play a prominent role in SLA: phonological short-term memory and WM's central executive, which is responsible for information management during processing. Our goal is to describe the theoretical underpinnings of WM's central executive, discuss tests to measure WM's central executive for L2 research, and provide a critical review of studies examining its role in L2 processing and learning. This issue is crucial for explaining individual differences in L2 learning, creating language-aptitude tests that predict L2 abilities, and implementing pedagogical practices that enhance verbal WM through trainability and compensate for WM capacity (WMC) shortcomings. Working Memory ModelsOf the numerous WM models that have emerged since the term was coined in the 1960s, the following are particularly popular within SLA circles: Just and Carpenter's domainspecifi c single-resource model, Baddeley's and Waters and Caplan's domain-specifi c multipleresource models, and the domain-free connectionist models. Domain-specifi c models claim that limitations in WMC constrain L2 learning, whereas domain-free models rely on limitations imposed by a domain-general attentional construct. In turn, single-resource models emphasize a trade-off between processing and storage, while multiple-resource models assume that processing and storage are independent from each other.Just and Carpenter's (1992) capacity theory posits that processing and storage depend on and compete for a shared pool of resources with a limited capacity that varies among individuals. Tasks that deplete a person's WMC can result in less storage and slower processing. This model differs from Baddeley's (2007) model that depicts WM as a multipleresource system formed by a central executive and three slave systems with independent limited capacities: two short-term storage systems (phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad) dedicated to a content domain (verbal and visuospatial respectively) and an episodic buffer that relays information between long-term memory and the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad. The central executive coordinates the fl ow of information between its slave systems, binds information from a number of sources into coherent episodes, determines what information is selected and inhibited, and decides when to shift between tasks or retrieval strategies. This polifacetic nature has led some scholars to propose separate resources within the central executive. Fo...

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Integrated knowledge of agreement in early and late English–Spanish bilinguals

Cited by 118 publications

References 51 publications

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem?

Working Memory in Second Language Acquisition

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