Failed gender agreement in L1 English L2 Spanish: Syntactic or lexical problem?

Alena Kirova,José Camacho

doi:10.16995/glossa.5761

Abstract

A recent proposal attributes morphosyntactic issues in L2 to lexical factors (Grüter et al. 2012; Hopp 2013). According to this lexical account, issues with gender agreement are caused by gender assignment issues – a failure to assign a word to a target-like class. We elaborate on this idea by exploring three potential cues to gender assignment: 1) semantic gender relating to sex (e.g. ‘girl’ vs. ‘boy’) 2) morphophonological cues, and 3) morphosyntactic agreement cues. Semantic and morphophonological cues may facilitate gender agreement only for a subset of nouns, whereas agreement cues can do so for all nouns, including opaque gender nouns that do not have semantic gender.Seventeen low proficiency and sixteen high proficiency L1 English L2 Spanish speakers and eighteen native Spanish controls judged the grammaticality of 60 experimental sentences. We compared participants’ gender agreement accuracy and reaction times (RTs) on experimental items with and without semantic gender, and with and without transparent gender morphemes. Semantic gender did not serve as a cue for gender assignment/agreement; instead, it slowed down RTs in high proficiency and control participants. Morphophonological cues significantly increased accuracy and decreased RTs in all groups. Finally, agreement cues did not seem to help low proficiency learners, since their accuracy on opaque nouns was barely above chance. By contrast, high proficiency learners exhibited native-like accuracy on opaque nouns. These findings support the lexical accounts of L2 gender agreement difficulties, adding more data to the growing body of research in this field.

Highlights

Grammatical gender is an inherent lexical feature on noun roots that triggers syntactic operations within the nominal domain (Carstens 2000; 2010)
Some representational approaches, such as the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (Hawkins & Chan 1997) and the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou 2007; Hawkins 2009), have ascribed L2 gender acquisition difficulties to impairment at the deep syntactic level and proposed that functional features such as grammatical gender cannot be acquired after a certain critical period
We suggest that they may be caused by an overreliance on morphophonological cues that results in a reduced tendency to attend to agreement cues; following nondeficit approaches such as Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), we argue that this tendency represents a temporary rather than permanent state of L2 grammars

Summary

Introduction

Grammatical gender is an inherent lexical feature on noun roots that triggers syntactic operations within the nominal domain (Carstens 2000; 2010). Other representational approaches, like the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Haznedar & Schwartz 1997; Prévost & White 2000), have attributed these difficulties to production errors: the inability to produce the right gender morpheme in real-time. Another influential approach is based on Lardiere (2008; 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), which suggests that variability in the L2 performance on gender is not an issue of availability of features in the L2 grammars but rather an issue of remapping feature configurations from the L1 to different configurations in the L2 – a complex process that raises challenges that may account for nontarget aspects of the L2

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion