Research on early grammatical gender processing: what do we know about Spanish-speaking children?

Este artículo reseña estudios recientes sobre adquisición y procesamiento del género gramatical en la población hispanohablante. Se comentan estudios con hablantes monolingües, bilingües, hablantes de herencia y niños diagnosticados con el Trastorno Evolutivo del Lenguaje (TEL). El enfoque principal es la revisión de estudios centrados en el procesamiento del género gramatical durante la comprensión de oraciones por parte de niños hispanohablantes. Según los resultados de dichas investigaciones, la adquisición del género gramatical parece ser diferente entre niños con TEL y aquellos con desarrollo típico. Además, desde edades tempranas, los niños hispanohablantes con desarrollo típico muestran sensibilidad a las “coocurrencias distribucionales de género”, es decir, a la información sobre el género gramatical que proporcionan los determinantes y artículos. Asimismo, se incluyen estudios sobre el procesamiento del género gramatical por parte de adultos, que muestran el efecto facilitador del género transparente durante el reconocimiento de nombres.

Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia

Background. Previous studies have argued that two types of linguistic gender exist: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent.Aim. We explore the hypothesis that these two types of gender entail distinct cognitive processes by investigating the performance of people with aphasia at the level of sentence comprehension.Methods and Procedure. Eleven people with aphasia and a control group of 13 age-matched healthy participants took part in a constrained completion choice task. The participants had to complete sentences in a way that made the last word gender congruent. The subjects of the sentences had either Semantic gender (“enfermera”, nurse; indicating the sex of the referent), Grammatical gender (“silla”, chair), or Opaque-Grammatical gender (“tomate”, tomato).Results. People with aphasia performed more poorly in all gender conditions than healthy controls. They also were less accurate in both the Grammatical and Opaque-Grammatical conditions than in the Semantic gender condition.Conclusion. We propose that semantic and grammatical gender entail two levels of gender processing and that semantic gender is processed faster because it provides more salient information.

Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia

Background. Previous studies have argued that two types of linguistic gender exist: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent. Aim. We explore the hypothesis that these two types of gender entail distinct cognitive processes by investigating the performance of people with aphasia at the level of sentence comprehension.Methods and Procedure. Eleven people with aphasia and a control group of 13 age-matched healthy participants took part in a constrained completion choice task. The participants had to complete sentences in a way that made the last word gender congruent. The subjects of the sentences had either Semantic gender (“enfermera”, nurse; indicating the sex of the referent), Grammatical gender (“silla”, chair), or Opaque-Grammatical gender (“tomate”, tomato).Results. People with aphasia performed more poorly in all gender conditions than healthy controls. They also were less accurate in both the Grammatical and Opaque-Grammatical conditions than in the Semantic gender condition.Conclusion. We propose that semantic and grammatical gender entail two levels of gender processing and that semantic gender is processed faster because it provides more salient information.

Grammatical gender processing in L2 speakers of Spanish

Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007; Dussias, Valdés Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo, & Gerfen, 2013). Conversely, adult second language (L2) learners for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language appear to need near-native proficiency to behave like native speakers (Dussias et al., 2013; Hopp, 2013). The question addressed here is whether sensitivity to grammatical gender in L2 learners of Spanish is modulated by the cognate status of nouns due to their heightened parallel orthographic, phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic activation. Additionally, the role of transparent and non-transparent word-final gender marking cues was examined because past studies have shown that native speakers of Spanish are sensitive to differences in gender transparency (Caffarra, Janssen, & Barber, 2014). Participants were English learners of Spanish and Spanish monolingual speakers. Data were collected using the visual world paradigm. Participants saw 2-picture visual scenes in which objects either matched in gender (same-gender trials) or mismatched (different-gender trials). Targets were embedded in the preamble Encuentra el/la ___ ‘Find the ___’. The monolingual group displayed an anticipatory effect on different gender trials, replicating past studies that show that native speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in prenominal modifiers predictively. The learners were able to use gender information on the articles to facilitate processing, but only when the nouns had gender endings that were transparent. Cognate status did not confer an advantage during grammatical gender processing.

LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC CONGRUENCY IN L2 PREDICTIVE GENDER PROCESSING

This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that is, whether a noun (“house”) is assigned to the same or a different gender class. Further, gender is syntactically realized on postnominal suffixes in Russian but on prenominal articles in German. For adjectives, both Russian and German mark gender on suffixes. In predictive gender processing, we find interactions of proficiency and congruency for gender-marked articles. Advanced L2 learners show nativelike gender prediction throughout. High-intermediate learners display asymmetries according to syntactic and lexical congruency. Predictive gender processing obtains for all nouns in the (syntactically congruent) adjective condition, yet only for lexically congruent nouns in the (syntactically incongruent) article condition.