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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12: Selected papers from the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Campinas, Brazil
Edited by Ruth E.V. Lopes, Juanito Ornelas de Avelar and Sonia M. L. Cyrino
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12] 2017
► pp. 127–140

Chapter 9
Does gender agreement carry a production cost?

Spanish gender vs. Palenquero

| The Pennsylvania State University

The present study examines the tradeoff between the on-line construction of modifier-noun gender agreement and the automatization of agreement, through the study of bilingual speakers of Spanish and the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, whose lexicon is highly cognate with Spanish, but which lacks gender agreement. The study focuses on L1 Spanish speakers who are acquiring Palenquero as L2, since when switching from the gender-agreeing L1 to the gender-less L2, the persistence or absence of gender agreement in cognate items can be taken as an indirect measure of the cost differential between producing morphosyntactic agreement and suppressing the carryover of obligatory agreement to the L2. The results of experiments conducted with bilingual Spanish-Palenquero speakers in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia reveal the tenacity of Spanish gender agreement among L2 Palenquero speakers; heritage Palenquero speakers’ retention of gender agreement falls between traditional speakers and L2 speakers.

Keywords: Palenquero language, Spanish gender, gender agreement, L2 acquisition, creole languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Palenquero language (Lengua ri Palenge)
  • 3.Experiment #1: Number recall + repetition
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Results and discussion
  • 4.Experiment #2: Speeded translation
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials
    • 4.3Procedure
    • 4.4Results and discussion
  • 5.General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.12.09lip
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Cited by 4 other publications

Lipski, John M
2018. Can agreement be suppressed in second-language acquisition? Data from the Palenquero–Spanish interface. Second Language Research 34:3 ► pp. 309 ff. DOI logo
Lipski, John M.
2020. What you hear is (not always) what you get. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10:3 ► pp. 315 ff. DOI logo
Valdés Kroff, Jorge R., Frederieke Rooijakkers & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2019. Spanish Grammatical Gender Interference in Papiamentu. Languages 4:4 ► pp. 78 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Palenquero and Spanish in Contact [Contact Language Library, 56], DOI logo

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