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Part of
The Acquisition of Gender: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun
[Studies in Bilingualism 63] 2022
► pp. 183–208

Chapter 8
Investigating grammatical gender agreement in Spanish

A methodological exploration of eye tracking

| University of Rhode Island

The present eye-tracking study tests the assumption that online techniques can tap implicit knowledge and reduce access to explicit knowledge by triangulating eye movements with a post-reading questionnaire. L1 English learners of L2 Spanish and Spanish native speakers (NSs) read sentences embedded with violations of determiner-noun and noun-adjective agreement followed by comprehension questions. They then completed a post-reading questionnaire that measured to what extent they were aware of the violations in the experimental stimuli. In the eye-tracking experiment, both L2 learners and Spanish NSs were sensitive to violations of determiner-noun agreement, but only Spanish NSs were sensitive to violations of noun-adjective agreement. On the post-reading questionnaire, most participants were also aware of the grammatical gender agreement violations, with determiner-noun agreement violations generally being more salient than noun-adjective violations. These results indicate that the violation detection paradigm implemented in this experiment did not entirely obviate explicit knowledge. Results are discussed in terms of methodological considerations researchers should keep in mind when designing and implementing studies that investigate grammatical gender agreement and other linguistic phenomena.

Keywords: online processing, eye tracking, implicit knowledge, explicit knowledge
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Eye tracking and grammatical gender agreement
    • 2.2Knowledge implemented in the violation detection paradigm
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Eye-tracking materials
    • 3.3Vocabulary posttest
    • 3.4Post-reading questionnaire
    • 3.5Procedure and apparatus
    • 3.6Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Reading times on determiner-noun agreement
    • 4.2Reading times on noun-adjective agreement
    • 4.3Post-reading questionnaire
      • Question 1
      • Question 2
      • Question 3
      • Question 4
      • Question 5
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.63.08spi
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