Processing of grammatical gender in French as a first and second language: Evidence from ERPs

Abstract

The present study examined the processing of grammatical gender in second language (L2) French as a function of language background (Experiment 1) and as a function of overt phonetic properties of agreement (Experiment 2) by examining Event Related Potential (ERP) responses to gender discord in L2 French. In Experiment 1 we explored the role of the presence/absence of abstract grammatical gender in the L1 (gendered German, ungendered English): we compared German and English learners of French when processing postnominal plural (no gender cues on determiner) attributive adjectives that either agreed in gender with the noun or presented a gender violation. We found grammaticalized responses (P600) by native and L1 English learners, but no response by German L1, a result we attribute to the possible influence of plurality, which is gender neutralized in German DP concord. In Experiment 2, we examined the role of overt phonetic cues to noun-adjective gender agreement in French, for both native speakers and Spanish L2 learners of French, finding that both natives and L2 learners showed a more robust P600 in the presence of phonetic cues. These data, in conjunction with those of other ERP studies can best be accounted for by a model that allows for native language influence, that is not, however constrained by age of acquisition, and that must also allow for clear cues in the input to influence acquisition and/or processing.

Brain Potentials Reveal Discrete Stages of L2 Grammatical Learning

“…In addition, psycholinguistic studies of proficient L2 learners have demonstrated that grammatical properties of the learner's L1 can influence processing of the L2, including the computation of morphosyntactic information in real time. Violations of L2 morphosyntactic contrasts that are also expressed in the L1 elicit stronger neural and behavioral responses than those that superficially differ between the L1 and L2 (Frenck‐Mestre et al, 2009; Jiang, 2004, 2007; Sabourin & Haverkort, 2003; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008; Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005). A case in point is the comparison of L2 acquisition of gender concord: ERP responses to gender concord violations are found earlier for learners whose L1 has this grammatical feature than for learners whose L1 lacks it, although several factors come into play (Frenck‐Mestre et al, 2009; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008).…”

“…Lexical and semantic/conceptual manipulations such as semantic fit between a word and its preceding context (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980), lexical status (Bentin, 1987), semantic priming (Bentin, McCarthy, & Wood, 1985), word frequency (Barber, Vergara, & Carreiras, 2004), and probability of occurrence within a given word string (Kutas & Hillyard, 1984) elicit a negative deflection peaking around 400 ms after the presentation of a stimulus (the N400 effect). In contrast, a large positive deflection with an onset at about 500 ms and a duration of several hundred milliseconds (the P600 effect) is elicited by a disparate set of syntactic anomalies, including violations of phrase structure (Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993; Neville, Nicol, Barss, Forster, & Garrett, 1991; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992), subcategorization (Ainsworth‐Darnell, Shulman, & Boland, 1998; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992; Osterhout, Holcomb, & Swinney, 1994) and violations in agreement of number, gender, and case (Frenck‐Mestre, Foucart, Carrasco, & Herschensohn, 2009; Frenck‐Mestre, Osterhout, J. McLaughlin, & Foucart, 2008; Hagoort et al, 1993; Osterhout & Mobley, 1995). Although some studies have reported an anterior negativity within a window ranging from 150 to 500 ms to some syntactic anomalies (the Left Anterior Negativity, or LAN: Friederici, 1995; Hahne & Friederici, 1999; Neville et al, 1991; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992; Osterhout & Mobley, 1995), the P600 effect is more reliably correlated with syntactic manipulations.…”

Clitic pronouns reveal the time course of processing gender and number in a second language

“…The P600 is elicited by a number of typical morpho-syntactic violations, including violations of phrase-structure and subcategorization (e.g., Ainsworth-Darnell, Shulman, & Boland, 1998; Hagoort, Brown & Groothusen, 1993; Neville, Nicol, Barss, Forster, & Garrett, 1991; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992) and number, gender, and case violations elicited in a variety of grammatical structures (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2012; Frenck-Mestre, Foucart, Carrasco, & Herschensohn, 2009; Frenck-Mestre, Osterhout, McLaughlin & Foucart, 2008; Osterhout & Mobley, 1995). The P600 has generally been interpreted as signaling morpho-syntactic reanalysis and repair, suggesting a relatively late, non-automatic process.…”

Lexical constraints in second language learning: Evidence on grammatical gender in German*

“…Recent evidence suggests that even in related languages that both have grammatical gender, learning L2 gender is difficult (Lemhöfer, Schriefers & Hanique, 2010). Similar to research on gender agreement in syntactic contexts, in future research it will be important to investigate these lexical issues using measures that are particularly sensitive to the earliest time course of processing, such as ERPs (e.g., Frenck-Mestre, Foucart, Carrasco-Ortiz & Herschensohn, 2009; Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2012). …”