This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on gender agreement than L2 learners, because their Spanish language acquisition started in infancy. Sixty-nine heritage speakers, 72 second language (L2) learners, and 22 native Spanish speakers were tested on their oral production, written comprehension, and written recognition of Spanish gender agreement. Results showed advantages for L2 learners in written tasks but advantages for heritage speakers in the oral task. We discuss the significance of these findings for SLA and heritage language acquisition.

Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition

This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research

Heritage Languages and their Speakers

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~antonell/SoraceSerratriceFiliaciBaldo2009

Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children

The use of two or more languages is common in most of the world. Yet, until recently, bilingualism was considered to be a complicating factor for language processing, cognition, and the brain. The past 20 years have witnessed an upsurge of research on bilingualism to examine language acquisition and processing, their cognitive and neural bases, and the consequences that bilingualism holds for cognition and the brain over the life span. Contrary to the view that bilingualism complicates the language system, this new research demonstrates that all of the languages that are known and used become part of the same language system. The interactions that arise when two languages are in play have consequences for the mind and the brain and, indeed, for language processing itself, but those consequences are not additive. Thus, bilingualism helps reveal the fundamental architecture and mechanisms of language processing that are otherwise hidden in monolingual speakers.

Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English-Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2 present or not present in the first language (number and gender agreement, respectively) were manipulated at two different sentence positions-within and across phrases. The results for a control group of age-matched native-speaker Spanish participants included an ERP pattern of LAN-type early negativity followed by P600 effect in response to both agreement violations and for both sentence positions. The late L2 learner results included a similar pattern, consisting of early negativity followed by P600, in the first sentence position (within-phrase agreement violations) but only P600 effects in the second sentence position (across-phrase agreement violation), as well as significant amplitude and onset latency differences between the gender and the number violation effects in both sentence positions. These results reveal that highly proficient learners can show electrophysiological correlates during L2 processing that are qualitatively similar to those of native speakers, but the results also indicate the contribution of factors such as age of acquisition and transfer processes from first language to L2.

/pdf/morphosyntactic-processing-in-late-second-language-learners-lxtqjx79qg.pdf

Morphosyntactic processing in late second-language learners

In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch coming from a historically similar system. The Romance languages have grammatical gender; however, the system is not congruent to the Dutch system. English does not have grammatical gender (although semantic gender is marked in the pronoun system). Experiment 1, a simple gender assignment task, showed that all L2 participants tested could assign the correct gender to Dutch nouns (all L2 groups performing on average above 80%), although having gender in the L1 did correlate with higher accuracy, particularly when the gender systems were very similar. Effects of noun familiarity and a default gender strategy were found for all participants. In Experiment 2 agreement between the noun and the relative pronoun was investigated. In this task a distinct performance hierarchy was found with the German group performing the best (though significantly worse than native speakers), the Romance group performing well above chance (though not as well as the German group), and the English group performing at chance. These results show that L2 acquisition of grammatical gender is affected more by the morphological similarity of gender marking in the L1 and L2 than by the presence of abstract syntactic gender features in the L1.

/pdf/transfer-effects-in-learning-a-second-language-grammatical-2owtzuzypg.pdf

Ger J. de Haan

Papers

Transfer effects in learning a second language grammatical gender system