Early and late bilingual processing of Spanish gender, morphology and gender congruency

Irma Alarcón

doi:10.7557/1.9.2.5523

Abstract

The present study investigates whether advanced proficiency-matched early and late bilinguals display gender agreement processing quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of native speakers of Spanish. To address this issue, a timed grammaticality judgment task was used to analyze the effects on accuracy and reaction times of grammatical gender, morphology, and gender congruency of the article and adjective within a noun phrase. Overall results indicated no significant statistical differences between the native speakers and the two bilingual groups. Both early and late bilinguals displayed similar grammatical gender knowledge in their underlying grammars. A detailed examination of the congruency effect, however, revealed that the native speakers, not the bilinguals, displayed sensitivity to gender agreement violations. Moreover, the native and heritage speakers pattern together in accuracy and directionality of gender agreement processing: both were less accurate with incongruent articles than with incongruent adjectives, while the second language learners were equally accurate in both agreement domains. Despite having internalized gender in their implicit grammars, the late bilinguals did not show native-like patterns in real time processing. The present findings suggest that, for high proficiency speakers, there is a distinct advantage for early over late bilinguals in achieving native-like gender lexical access and retrieval. Therefore, age of acquisition, in conjunction with learning context, might be the best predictor of native-like gender agreement processing at advanced and near-native proficiency levels.

Highlights

A major issue in second language (L2) acquisition research is the extent to which adultL2 learners are able to fully develop both the implicit knowledge and the processing routines associated with grammatical features that are absent in their native language (L1)
Recent research with heritage language (HL) speakers of Spanish, those who grow up in a home where Spanish as a minority language is spoken, suggests that gender is a difficult grammatical feature for them as well. (Montrul 2016 presents a detailed account of this population.) Understanding why gender is problematic for both L2 and HL learners, and what this implies for L2 acquisition theories, has become a prominent theme in current L2 and HL research agendas (Foote 2011; Grüter et al 2012; Montrul et al 2014)
The present study investigated the gender agreement behavior of early and late bilinguals through a written, timed grammaticality judgment task that considered the influence of noun gender, morphology, and gender congruency on Spanish gender agreement within a noun phrase

Summary

Introduction

A major issue in second language (L2) acquisition research is the extent to which adultL2 learners (late bilinguals) are able to fully develop both the implicit knowledge (representation) and the processing routines (computation) associated with grammatical features that are absent in their native language (L1). This research has centered on comprehension data, often mixing grammatical and ungrammatical phrases or sentences in order to assess L2 sensitivity to gender agreement violations This sensitivity (the gender congruency or grammaticality effect) is manifested either in longer RTs or by a P600 effect, an ERP elicited when the brain detects a grammatical error during syntactic processing (e.g., Barber & Carreiras 2005). These findings tend to converge with representational access approaches by showing that L2 learners, even in the early stages of language learning, display sensitivity to a feature absent in their L1

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion