Processing of gender and number agreement in late Spanish bilinguals: A commentary on Sagarra and Herschensohn

Abstract

IntroductionSagarra and Herschensohn's article examines English L2 learners' knowledge of Spanish gender and number agreement and their sensitivity to gender and number agreement violations (e.g. *El ingeniero presenta el prototipo *famosa/*famosos en la conferencia) during real-time sentence processing. It raises some interesting questions that are central to both acquisition and process- ing research. In the following paper, I discuss a selection of these topics, for instance, what types of knowledge may or may not be available/accessible during real-time L2 processing at different proficiency levels, what the differences may be between the processing of number versus gen- der concord, and perhaps most importantly, the problem of how to characterize the relationship between the grammar and the parser, both in general terms and in the context of language acquisition.Explicit and implicit knowledgeS&H report that although both their lower proficient and intermediate English L2 learners of Spanish were able to demonstrate adequate knowledge of Spanish gender and number in an inde- pendent grammar test, whether or not they could make accurate metalinguistic judgments in an off-line task and were sensitive to agreement discord during real-time processing depended on their general proficiency. The intermediate learners were able to assess successfully the ungram- maticality of gender as well as number disconcord and were also sensitive online to number and gender agreement violations. Furthermore, although the intermediates were not fully native-like, they performed similarly to the Spanish control group in that gender disconcord was overall more difficult to process than number disconcord, and animate nouns more difficult than inanimates. The less proficient group showed no effects at all for the gender conditions, and although they could judge the ungrammaticality of the items in the number concord conditions, they were not sensitive online to number agreement violations. One might disagree with the authors' claims that these results strongly go against fundamental difference accounts of L2 acquisition (e.g. Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004) because their intermediate learners start to show target-like processing and representation (p.3) of parameterized functional features not available in their L1: one would need to test a much more advanced group showing native-Spanish-like performance to make such a strong claim (see Keating, 2009). Nevertheless, these data do show that the English learners can acquire some knowledge of Spanish gender concord, despite not having grammatical gender in their L1.Interestingly, the results highlight the fact that the learner groups have different types of knowl- edge of the phenomena under investigation, as tapped into by the three different tasks. Critically, both groups were shown to know explicitly the gender of the nouns used in these experiments, but one could argue that only the intermediate learners had developed some implicit or automatized knowledge of gender concord, as captured during the real-time comprehension task. Furthermore, given that the lower proficiency group were not sensitive at all to number discord during real-time processing, this suggests the fact that English has number agreement (between demonstratives and nouns, e.g. these books, as well as between subject and verbs) helped them, but only in the gram- maticality judgment task. However, it must be assumed that the lower proficient group indeed computed the dependency at some no doubt later stage in the processing of the experimental items because they were able to judge the number agreement items correctly. Taken together, these find- ings suggest that the immediate computing of agreement during online comprehension, even with phenomena that are available in one's L1, is a skill that must be developed with L2 experience. S&H suggest that a working memory (WM) account such as that of Ullman (2005) can explain these findings-the less proficient learners have declarative knowledge that has yet to be procedur- alized, and critically, this automatization can eventually take place, as shown by the performance of the intermediate learners. …