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WHEN GENDER AND LOOKING GO HAND IN HAND

Grammatical Gender Processing In L2 Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2013

Paola E. Dussias ,
Jorge R. Valdés Kroff ,
Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo  and
Chip Gerfen
Paola E. Dussias*
Affiliation:
Penn State University, Center for Language Science
Jorge R. Valdés Kroff
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo
Affiliation:
Universidad de Puerto Rico
Chip Gerfen
Affiliation:
American University
*
*Correspondence concerning this articleshould be addressed to Paola E. Dussias, 237 Burrowes Building, Department ofSpanish, Italian & Portuguese, Penn State University, UniversityPark, PA 16802; E-mail: pdussias@psu.edu
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Abstract

In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical genderinformation encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcomingnouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whethergrammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2)processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) and 18English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanishproficiency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did notmatch in gender. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while theylistened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items werepreceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreedonly with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners ofSpanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the firstlanguage (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing.Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fixations on the objectsin each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent ondifferent-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reportedin past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatoryeffect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition,participants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like theSpanish monolinguals, the highly proficient English-Spanish speakers showedevidence of using gender information during online processing, whereas the lessproficient learners did not. The results suggest that both proficiency in the L2and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness ofmorphosyntactic information during speech processing.

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Articles
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 35 , Issue 2: Eye-Movement Recordings in Second Language Research , June 2013 , pp. 353 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

The writing of this article was supported in part by the National ScienceFoundation (NSF) grant BCS-0821924 to Paola E. Dussias and Chip Gerfen, byNSF grants BCS-0955090 and OISE-0968369 to Judith F. Kroll and Paola E.Dussias, and by a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowshipto Jorge Valdés Kroff. We would like to thank the audience atPenn State’s Center for Language Science and the audience at the2010 Second Language Research Forum for helpful comments. All errors are ourown.

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