Sensitivity to Violations of Gender Agreement in Native and Nonnative Spanish: An Eye‐Movement Investigation

Abstract

This article reports the results of an eye-tracking experiment that investigated the effects of structural distance on readers' sensitivity to violations of Spanish gender agreement during online sentence comprehension. The study tracked the eye movements of native Spanish speakers and English-speaking learners of Spanish as they read sentences that contained nouns modified by postnominal adjectives located in three syntactic domains: (a) in the DP, (b) in the VP, or (c) in a subordinate clause. In half of the sentences in each condition, adjectives agreed with the noun in gender, and in half, they did not. The results indicate that gender agreement is acquirable in adulthood, contra the failed functional features hypothesis, and that the distance that separates nouns and adjectives affects the detection of gender anomalies in the second language. The findings support Clahsen and Felser's (2006a) shallow structure hypothesis, as it pertains to morphological processing.

The role of proficiency and working memory in gender and number agreement processing in L1 and L2 Spanish

“…Recent studies have looked at L2 learners' abilities to implement determiner phrase (DP) agreement of grammatical gender and number in languages that require it (e.g., French, Spanish, Dutch, German) by learners whose L1 does or does not require concord (e.g., Liceras et al, 2008). Most studies on gender and number agreement in L2 Spanish focus exclusively on production data (Franceschina, 2001;Hawkins and Franceschina, 2004;Bruhn de Garavito and White, 2002;Foote, 2008), some combine perception and production tasks (Franceschina, 2002;McCarthy, 2008;Montrul et al, 2008;White et al, 2004), and only few employ online tasks to measure real-time processing during comprehension (Alarcó n, 2006(Alarcó n, , 2009Gillon-Dowens et al, 2008Keating, 2009;Sagarra, 2007;Tokowicz and MacWhinney, 2005).…”

The cognitive processing of candidates during reading tests: Evidence from eye-tracking

“…Eye-tracking research into L2 reading has unfortunately been limited almost exclusively to investigating online parsing procedures and for detecting sensitivity to ungrammaticalities in isolation, as opposed to researching the reading of texts beyond the clause level (see, e.g., Verhagen, 2009;Keating, 2009). However, some research uses regressions and the total fixation time on words and phrases to draw inferences about later processing stages in ways which will be of value here (see Roberts, 2012 for a review).…”

Gender Agreement in Online Versus Classroom Students of First-Semester Spanish

“…The lack of significance in immediacy goes against previous research (Keating 2009;Bruhn de Garavito, and White 2002). The reason for this disparity of results may be due to different nuances in the coding method.…”