Morphosyntactic Features Versus Morphophonological Features in L2 Gender Acquisition: A Cross-Language Perspective

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate the reliability of morphosyntactic versus morphophonological features in the acquisition of L2 gender of inanimate nouns across languages. Based on Anna Kibort study “Towards a typology of grammatical features”(2010), the current research proposes that the presence of a gendered determiner is more reliable than gendered noun-final morphemes in the process of adjective agreement within the Determiner Phrase (DP) across two gender transparency system languages. To test this hypothesis, the current research compares English second-language (L2) learners of Hebrew and Spanish. Both languages have a binary gender system for nouns; however, Hebrew lacks a determiner with gender value, but provides a plural ending morpheme that encodes both number and gender. In contrast, Spanish has a gendered article that facilitates gender acquisition, but lacks a plural ending morpheme that indicates gender. Thirty-two L1 English–L2 Spanish learners and thirty-two L1 English–L2 Hebrew learners with different proficiency levels completed an adjective-agreement forced-choice task and an adjective-agreement elicited-production task—in their respective target languages. The tasks contained Spanish opaque plural nouns and Hebrew plural transparent nouns, highlighting the role of the determiner in Spanish and the role of transparency plural-ending morphemes in Hebrew. The results revealed that Spanish L2 learners performed better on the tasks than L2 Hebrew learners, offering evidence for the relevance of syntactic agreement knowledge over phonological cues in gender acquisition.