Abstract
It is well documented that L2 learners of Spanish have difficulty with inflectional morphology, specifically with gender agreement. Studies have shown that gender agreement is a feature of the second language that is acquired very late (Keating, 2009; Leeser et al., 2011; White et al., 2004). The majority of experimental studies that investigate gender agreement processing focus on grammatical gender agreement and fail to consider how learners process semantic or natural gender agreement. This study, therefore, examines how beginning and intermediate L2 learners of Spanish process grammatical gender agreement as well as semantic gender agreement. This study also investigates the proposal that L2 learners of Spanish will resort to a masculine form when processing gender agreement (Harris, 1991).
In this study, L2 Spanish learners (n = 71) and L1 Spanish speakers (n = 12) completed a self-paced reading task to investigate processing of noun-adjective agreement. The learners were presented with sentences word by word, and were asked comprehension questions after each sentence. Half of the target sentences contained grammatical gender and the other half contained semantic gender. Also, half of the sentences were grammatical and half were ungrammatical, and to investigate a default form, half of the sentences were masculine and half were feminine. Learners reading times were compared across noun class (semantic gender or grammatical gender), gender (masculine or feminine) and grammaticality conditions. It was predicted that beginning and intermediate learners would recognize violations of semantic gender, but would not recognize violations of grammatical gender, and that they would default to a masculine form. Our results support this prediction. The findings are discussed in light of VanPatten’s (2007) input processing theory, which states that learners will process meaningful grammatical forms before nonmeaningful grammatical forms, especially when that form lacks communicative value, as is the case with grammatical gender.
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