Article published in:
The Acquisition and Processing of Spanish and Portuguese Morphosyntax: Theoretical and experimental issues
Edited by Rachel Klassen, Anahí Alba de la Fuente, Joanne Markle LaMontagne and Almudena Basanta y Romero-Valdespino
[Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 29:2] 2016
► pp. 523–543

The processing of gender assignment in Spanish

Does canonicity have an effect on Basque speakers?

| Mondragon Unibertsitatea
This paper reports on an experiment investigating the processing of accurate gender assignment in canonical and non-canonical inanimate nouns in Spanish by native speakers of Basque with nativelike proficiency in Spanish. 33 Basque/Spanish bilinguals and 32 native speakers of Spanish completed an online and an offline gender assignment task. Participants assigned gender to inanimate nouns with canonical (-o; -a) and non-canonical word endings (-e; consonants). The results revealed that the Basque/Spanish bilingual group obtained high accuracy scores in both tasks, similar to the Spanish native speaker group. Interestingly, unlike the Spanish group, the Basque speakers showed faster reaction times with feminine nouns than masculine ones. Canonicity seems to be a strong cue for both groups, since all participants were more accurate and faster with canonical word endings. Even though quantitatively Basque/Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals’ gender assignment accuracy rates do not differ, qualitatively, the Basque/Spanish bilinguals’ assignment patterns seem to differ somewhat from those of the native Spanish speakers.
Keywords: Basque, canonicity, Spanish, assignment, gender
Published online: 02 February 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.29.2.06ima
References

References

Alarcón, I.
(2011) Spanish gender agreement under complete and incomplete acquisition: Early and late bilinguals’ linguistic behavior within the noun phrase. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14, 332–350. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2014) Grammatical gender in second language Spanish. In K.L. Gesslin (Ed.), The handbook of Spanish second language acquisition (pp. 202–218). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Hernández, A., & Pizzamiglio, L.
(1996) Gender priming in Italian. Perception and Psychophysics, 58, 992–1004. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Pizzamiglio, L., D’Amico, S., & Hernandez, A.
(1995) Gender and lexical access in Italian. Perception & Psychophysics, 57(6), 847–862. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bruhn de Garavito, J., & White, L.
(2002) L2 acquisition of Spanish DPs: The status of grammatical features. In A.T. Pérez-Leroux & J. Liceras (Eds.), The acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax: The L1 / L2 connection (pp. 153–174). Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, S.
(1989) Second language acquisition and the computational paradigm. Language Learning, 39, 535–594. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Davis, C.J., & Perea, M.
(2005) BuscaPalabras: A program deriving orthographic and phonological neighborhood statistics and other psycholinguistic indices in Spanish. Behavior Research Methods, 37, 665–671. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, J.M., & Véronique, D.
(2001) Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: A cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 275–296. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dussias, P.E.
(2003) Syntactic ambiguity resolution in L2 learners: Some effects of bilinguality on L1 and L2 processing strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 529–557. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ezeizabarrena, M.J.
(2005) Development in early Basque-Spanish language mixing. Paper presented at V International Symposium on Bilingualism , Barcelona, 20-23 March.
Franceschina, F.
(2001) Morphological or syntactic deficits in near-native speakers?: An assessment of some current proposals. Second Language Research, 17, 213–247. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2005) Fossilized second language grammars: The acquisition of grammatical gender. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Foote, R.
(2014) Age of acquisition and sensitivity to gender in Spanish word recognition. Language Acquisition, 21, 365–385. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Guillelmon, D., & Grosjean, F.
(2001) The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals. Memory and Cognition, 29, 503–511. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A.
(2012) Grammatical gender in L2A: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28, 191–215. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Harris, J.
(1991) The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 22, 27–62.Google Scholar
Hernández-Pina, F.
(1984) Teorías psico-sociolingüísticas y su aplicación a la adquisición del español como lengua materna (Psycho-sociolinguistic theories and their application to the acquisition of Spanish as a mother tongue). Madrid: Siglo XXI.Google Scholar
Kroll, J.F., Dussias, P.E., Bogulski, C.A., & Valdes-Kroff, J.
(2012) Juggling two languages in one mind: What bilinguals tell us about language processing and its consequences for cognition. In B. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 229–262). San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Larrañaga, P., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P.
(2013).The linguistic competence of early Basque-Spanish bilingual children and a Spanish monolingual child. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17, 577–601. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Manterola, J., & Ezeizabarrena, M.J.
(2004) La mezcla códigos (euskera-castellano) en el habla infantil: Una prueba más de la separación gramatical temprana. In C. Pastor (Ed.), Perspectivas interdisciplinares de la lingüística aplicada. Tomo I: Adquisición y aprendizaje (pp. 187–201). Valencia: Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada.Google Scholar
Mariscal, S.
(2008) Early acquisition of gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase: Starting small. Journal of Child Language, 35, 1–29.Google Scholar
McCarthy, C.
(2008) Morphological variability in the comprehension of agreement: An argument for representation over computation. Second Language Research, 24, 459–486. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., Foote, R., & Perpiñán, S.
(2008) Gender agreement in adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers: The effects of age and context of acquition. Language Learning, 58, 503–553. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., Davidson, J., de la Fuente, I., & Foote, R.
(2014) Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17, 118–138. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Parafita Couto, M.C., Munarriz, A., Epelde, I., Deuchar, M., & Oyharçabal, B.
(2015) Gender conflict resolution in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(2), 304–323. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Pereira, M.
(1991) The acquisition of gender: What Spanish children can tell us. Journal of Child Language, 18, 571–590. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S.
(1999) Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., & Prince, A.
(1994) Regular and irregular morphology and the psychological status of rules of grammar. In S.D. Lima, R.L. Corrigan, & G.K. Iverson (Eds.), The reality of linguistic rules (pp. 321–352). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S., & Ullman, M.T.
(2002) The past and the future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 456–463. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sabourin, L., Stowe, L.A., & de Haan, G.J.
(2006) Transfer effects in learning a second language grammatical gender system. Second Language Research, 22, 1–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sagarra, N., & Herschensohn, J.
(2011) Proficiency and animacy effects on L2 gender agreement processing during comprehension. Language Learning, 61, 80–116. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Syndicate, U.C.L.E.
(2001) Quick placement test. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Taraban, R., & Kempe, V.
(1999) Gender processing in native and non-native Russian speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 119–148. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Taraban, R., & Roark, B.
(1996) Competition in language-based categories. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 119–148.Google Scholar
White, L., Valenzuela, E., Kozlowska-Macgregor, M., & Leung, Y.K.I.
(2004) Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 105–133. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Pérez-Tattam, Ezeizabarrena, Stadthagen-González & Mueller Gathercole
2019. Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children. Languages 4:3 ► pp. 58 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.