Exploring grammatical gender in L2 Spanish : is a transparent gender system easy to use for Russian-speaking students?

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a pilot study investigating grammatical gender assignment to transparent and opaque inanimate Spanish nouns by Russian-speaking learners with an intermediate-advanced level in L2. 29 Russian natives and 28 native speakers of Spanish completed three gender assignment tasks. Participants had to assign correct gender to inanimate real nouns with transparent (-o, -a) and opaque (-e, consonants) endings, and to nonce words with transparent (-o, -a) or opaque endings. The results revealed that, although the L2 group obtained high accuracy scores in gender assignment tasks, there were significant differences compared to the native speakers. The effects of transparency of the L2 gender system and of the native language of L2 students were also found. Specifically, the L2 students used transparent nouns significantly better than opaque nouns. Furthermore, the L2 group assigned grammatical gender to opaque nouns significantly better when these nouns have the same gender in Russian.