Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem?

Abstract

Mastery of grammatical gender is difficult to achieve in a second language (L2). This study investigates whether persistent difficulty with grammatical gender often observed in the speech of otherwise highly proficient L2 learners is best characterized as a production-specific performance problem, or as difficulty with the retrieval of gender information in real-time language use. In an experimental design that crossed production/comprehension and online/offline tasks, highly proficient L2 learners of Spanish performed at ceiling in offline comprehension, showed errors in elicited production, and exhibited weaker use of gender cues in online processing of familiar (though not novel) nouns than native speakers. These findings suggest that persistent difficulty with grammatical gender may not be limited to the realm of language production, but could affect both expressive and receptive use of language in real time. We propose that the observed differences in performance between native and non-native speakers lie at the level of lexical representation of grammatical gender and arise from fundamental differences in how infants and adults approach word learning.

Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data.

“…An examination of all of the L2ers' errors involving both a determiner and an adjective (50 out of 1320 responses) revealed that both error types were infrequent, but there were more than twice as many errors of assignment (a total of 35) than errors of agreement (a total of 15). This low incidence of agreement errors was also observed in the study by Grüter et al (2012), although they also found a higher incidence of assignment errors than we did.…”

“…We expected gender agreement with these nouns to be more challenging for adult L2ers, based on previous studies (e.g., Foucart and Frenck-Mestre, 2012;Franceschina, 2005;Grüter et al, 2012;Meulman et al, 2016;Montrul et al, 2008;Sabourin, 2003;Sabourin and Stowe, 2008). Experiment 2 used a spot-the-difference task to examine similar dependencies (determiner-noun-adjective number and gender agreement) in elicited spoken production.…”

“…These results are at odds with previous L2 studies on gender. For example, Montrul et al, (2008) examined gender agreement in spoken production in a group of adult L1-English L2-Spanish learners, and found a higher error rate with feminine than masculine nouns (i.e., more default errors) both at the level of syntactic gender agreement and lexical gender assignment (see also Grüter et al, 2012) (2008) and White et al (2004). In both studies, L2 learners showed higher error rates with feminine than masculine nouns (i.e., more default errors), although this asymmetry was especially characteristic of learners at the intermediate level of proficiency, not so much of advanced learners.…”

“…This was the pattern observed by Prévost and White (2000) with respect to the acquisition of finite forms in adult L2 learners of French and German. Grüter et al (2012) agree that inflectional variability with grammatical gender is tied to difficulty with lexical retrieval, but point to gender assignment (i.e., linking nouns to their gender classes) as the source of variability. The authors examined gender agreement in advanced L1-English L2-Spanish learners, and found that they were native-like in offline comprehension, but made errors of gender assignment in production and could not utilize gender predictively in online comprehension.…”

“…Notice that these results contrast with those by Gillon-Dowens et al (2010, Alemán Bañón et al (2014), and Rossi et al (2014), where the P600 for gender errors remained robust across a range of different syntactic domains (including clitics, a syntactic category that is absent in English). One possibility is that the lack of strong distributional cues to gender made it difficult for the L2ers in the Foucart and Frenck-Mestre study to retrieve gender information online, at least in contexts that can be considered more taxing (in line with Grüter et al, 2012 andHopp, 2013). Sabourin (2003) and Sabourin and Stowe (2008) Their results revealed that only the L1-German group showed robust offline knowledge of lexical gender (mean accuracy rate: 93%) and native-like processing for gender violations (i.e., P600).…”