Predictive processing of grammatical gender: Using gender cues to facilitate processing in Spanish

Abstract

The present study investigated whether Spanish monolinguals and English learners of Spanish use grammatical gender information in articles and nouns to facilitate the processing of upcoming adjectives. Specifically, this study examined the role of noun transparency, the number of gender cues, and L2 proficiency. The results of an eye-tracking task revealed that Spanish monolinguals predicted the gender of upcoming adjectives much sooner than L2 learners. L2 learners used grammatical gender predictively, but their predictions were delayed compared to monolinguals. Advanced L2 learners predicted upcoming adjectives faster than intermediate learners. Notably, transparent nouns and a higher number of gender cues increased target fixations in all groups. Target fixations of advanced learners increased especially with transparent nouns, and target fixations of intermediate learners were higher with more gender cues present. The results showed that L2 learners can integrate L2 morphosyntactic information during rapid speech processing, and that transparently marked nouns and more gender cues aid gender processing.