Spanish Grammatical Gender Interference in Papiamentu

Jorge R Valdés Kroff,Frederieke Rooijakkers,M Carmen Parafita Couto

doi:10.3390/languages4040078

Jorge R Valdés Kroff, Frederieke Rooijakkers + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4040078

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to determine whether Spanish-like gender agreement causes interference in speakers of Papiamentu (a Western Romance-lexified creole language) who also speak Spanish. Papiamentu and Spanish are highly cognate languages in terms of their lexicons. However, Papiamentu lacks grammatical gender assignment and agreement, leading to cognate words with major morpho-syntactic differences. A total of 41 participants with different linguistic profiles (Papiamentu-dominant, Dutch-dominant, Spanish-dominant, and Spanish heritage speaker-Papiamentu bilinguals) listened to 82 Papiamentu sentences, of which 40 contained a Spanish-like gender-agreeing element on the Determiner, Adjective, or Determiner + Adjective and with half of the experimental items marked with overtly masculine (i.e., -o) or feminine (i.e., -a) gender morphology. Participants performed a forced-choice acceptability task and were asked to repeat each sentence. Results showed that Spanish-dominant speakers experienced the greatest interference of Spanish gender features in Papiamentu. This suggests that in cases where speakers must suppress gender in their second language (L2), this is not easy to do. This is especially the case in highly cognate languages that differ in whether they realize gender features.

Highlights

Grammatical differences between languages often result in difficulties in second language (L2) acquisition and bilingual strategies in language contact (e.g., Hopp 2013; Muysken 2013).This cross-linguistic interference is likely to occur in the case of highly cognate languages due to increased lexical and semantic overlap
The participants were divided into four different categories, illustrated in (3): We refer to our participants as multilinguals because the residents on the island are regularly exposed to Dutch, English, Papiamentu, and Spanish to varying degrees, with the dominant or preferred language often intersecting with racial identity (Kester 2011)
Most L2 acquisition studies that focus on how grammatical gender is acquired by speakers of a non-gendered language have shown that acquisition of gender assignment and agreement is difficult

Summary

Introduction

Grammatical differences between languages often result in difficulties in second language (L2) acquisition and bilingual strategies in language contact (e.g., Hopp 2013; Muysken 2013).This cross-linguistic interference is likely to occur in the case of highly cognate languages due to increased lexical and semantic overlap. Grammatical differences between languages often result in difficulties in second language (L2) acquisition and bilingual strategies in language contact (e.g., Hopp 2013; Muysken 2013). The current study examines what happens when speakers of a morphologically rich language (Spanish) speak a highly cognate language that lacks a morphological feature (Papiamentu). We examine this issue through gender agreement due to it being a well-studied morpho-syntactic element in first language (L1) and L2 acquisition (Montrul 2004).

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