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Studies in second language acquisition, 2013-06, Vol.35 (2), p.353-387
Ort / Verlag
New York, USA: Cambridge University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2013
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender
information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming
nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether
grammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2)
processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) and 18
English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanish
proficiency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did not
match in gender. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they
listened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items were
preceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreed
only with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners of
Spanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the first
language (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing.
Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fixations on the objects
in each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent on
different-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reported
in past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatory
effect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition,
participants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like the
Spanish monolinguals, the highly proficient English-Spanish speakers showed
evidence of using gender information during online processing, whereas the less
proficient learners did not. The results suggest that both proficiency in the L2
and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness of
morphosyntactic information during speech processing.