Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers

Abstract

Three experiments using online processing measures explored whether native and non-native Spanish-speaking adults use gender-marked articles to identify referents of target nouns more rapidly, as shown previously with 3-year-old children learning Spanish as L1 (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007). In Experiment 1, participants viewed familiar objects with names of either the same or different grammatical gender while listening to Spanish sentences referring to one object. L1 adults, like L1 children, oriented to the target more rapidly on different-gender trials, when the article was informative about noun identity; however, L2 adults did not. Experiments 2 and 3 controlled for frequency of exposure to article-noun pairs by using novel nouns. L2 adults could not exploit gender information when different article-noun pairs were used in teaching and testing. Experience-related factors may influence how L1 adults and children and L2 adults—who learned Spanish at different ages and in different settings—use grammatical gender in realtime processing.

Idiosyncratic Grammars: Syntactic Processing in Second Language Comprehension Uses Subjective Feature Representations

“…This would be consistent with the idea of more "shallow," that is, less syntactically driven processing (cf. the "good enough" account by Ferreira, 2003) in L2 compared with native speakers (see Clahsen & Felser, 2006) and with behavioral studies suggesting that L2 speakers may not make use of word gender (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010;Scherag, Demuth, Rösler, Neville, & Röder, 2004;Guillelmon & Grosjean, 2001). However, the recategorization of trials in terms of subjective correctness for the L2 learners showed a different picture: Subjectively unexpected determiners triggered an ERP response on the subsequent noun.…”

Predictive sentence processing in L2 and L1

“…I will not try to distinguish among these models; instead, I will assume a rather general approach, mainly based on ideas put forward by researchers working in a connectionist tradition (e.g., Elman, 1991;MacDonald, 2013;MacDonald, Pearlmuttter, & Seidenberg, 1994;Tabor & Tanenhaus, 1999). Based on a lifetime of exposure to their native language, native speakers of a language have learned to associate certain words, word categories, syntactic frames and rules, building a database of relative frequencies of occurrence and associations.…”

“…Another example of the effect of frequency information is the subcategorization bias of verbs. Scholars working in the constraint-based lexicalist framework have provided ample evidence that the relative frequencies of subcategorization frames and argument types of a verb affect processing preferences (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995;MacDonald et al, 1994;Stowe, Tanenhaus, & Carlson, 1991;Wilson & Garnsey, 2009). This information is also used in a predictive manner, as shown by Boland (2005).…”

“…Exposure based models, such as constraint-based lexicalist models (MacDonald et al, 1994) and tuning models (Cuetos, Mitchell, & Corley, 1996) were primarily developed to account for native language processing, but have recently been applied to non-native processing (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007;Dussias & Cramer Scaltz, 2008;Frenck-Mestre & Pynte, 1997). These models assign an important role to frequency information: possible analyses for the input encountered are ranked on the basis of frequency information and can be seen as weighed predictions about what is to come next.…”

Eye-Tracking and the Visual World Paradigm

“…Thus far, results have been mixed, even when the same L2 is examined. Lew-Williams and Fernald (2010) and Grüter et al (2012) did not find gender anticipation or facilitation effects for intermediate and advanced…”