Grammatical gender processing in L2 speakers of Spanish: Does cognate status help?
Open Access
- Author:
- Halberstadt, Lauren
- Area of Honors:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Dr. Giuli Dussias, Thesis Supervisor
John Lipski, Thesis Honors Advisor
Carrie Neal Jackson, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Spanish
linguistics
bilingual
cognate
processing
grammatical gender - Abstract:
- One important finding in current literature is that native speakers of Spanish use gender marking on Spanish articles, such as la and el, to facilitate processing of upcoming Spanish nouns (e.g. Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010). Conversely, native English speakers (for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language) who are highly proficient speakers of Spanish and who have demonstrated mastery of the Spanish grammatical gender system, do not behave like native Spanish speakers in this respect. One question, however, is whether this result is modulated by the cognate status of the words. Cognates are words that are similar in form and meaning in the two languages (such as guitar in English and guitarra in Spanish). Here we investigate whether English learners of Spanish can more easily access gender information when words are cognates. We used an experimental eye-tracking technique known as the Visual World Paradigm. In this technique, participants hear instructions to click a picture displayed on a computer screen while their eye movements are being recorded. English-Spanish participants at Penn State were recruited as well as a group of monolingual speakers of Spanish (i.e., the control group) at the University of Granada. Results show that for the monolingual speakers, cognate status of words does not modulate grammatical gender processing. English-Spanish participants are expected to use grammatical gender only when words are cognates in English and Spanish. This research has important implications because it touches on critical aspects of language learning.