scholarly journals Production-based training benefits the comprehension and production of grammatical gender in L2 German

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Valérie Keppenne ◽  
Elise W. M. Hopman ◽  
Carrie N. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Classroom Instruction ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Artificial Language ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
And Gender

Abstract Ongoing debate exists regarding the role of production-based versus comprehension-based training for L2 learning. However, recent research suggests an advantage for production training due to benefits stemming from the opportunity to compare generated output with feedback and from the memory mechanisms associated with language production. Based on recent findings with an artificial language paradigm, we investigated the effects of production-based and comprehension-based training for learning grammatical gender among beginning L2 German learners. Participants received production-based or comprehension-based training on grammatical gender assignment and gender agreement between determiners, adjectives, and 15 German nouns, followed by four tasks targeting the comprehension and production of the target nouns and their corresponding gender marking on determiners and adjectives. Both groups were equally accurate in comprehending and producing the nouns. For tasks requiring knowledge of grammatical gender, the production-based group outperformed the comprehension-based group on both comprehension and production tests. These findings demonstrate the importance of language production for creating robust linguistic representations and have important implications for classroom instruction.

scholarly journals Neutrales Rufnamengenus zwischen Grammatik und Pragmatik

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Simone Busley ◽  
Julia Fritzinger
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Gender Variation ◽  
German Dialects ◽  
And Gender

In numerous German dialects and in Luxembourgish, female first names can take on both feminine and neuter gender agreement, thus leading to gender variation on a paradigmatical level and gender mismatches on a syntactical level. This is contradictory to canonical conceptions of gender systems and can be interpreted as a case of degrammaticalization. Here, grammatical gender has been refunctionalized as a socio-pragmatic marker which indicates the age and status of the woman referred to as well as the speaker’s relationship to her. In some varieties, regrammaticalization of gender assignment resulted in female first names always taking neuter agreements. The present article focusses on the reconstruction of the stages of degrammaticalization and regrammaticalization of gender assignment based on data of the research project “Das Anna und ihr Hund – Weibliche Rufnamen im Neutrum”. Analyses of the data indicate that personal pronouns as the targets most prone to differing agreement played a key role in this process.

Language processing and language acquisition through the lens of Relational Morphology

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-232
Author(s):  
Ray Jackendoff ◽  
Jenny Audring
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Spreading Activation ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Memory Network ◽  
Complex Words

This chapter asks what is happening to linguistic representations during language use, and how representations are formed in the course of language acquisition. It is shown how Relational Morphology’s theory of representations can be directly embedded into models of processing and acquisition. Central is that the lexicon, complete with schemas and relational links, constitutes the long-term memory network that supports language production and comprehension. The chapter first discusses processing: the nature of working memory; promiscuous (opportunistic) processing; spreading activation; priming; probabilistic parsing; the balance between storage and computation in recognizing morphologically complex words; and the role of relational links and schemas in word retrieval. It then turns to acquisition, which is to be thought of as adding nodes and relational links to the lexical network. The general approach is based on the Propose but Verify procedure of Trueswell et al. (2013), plus conservative generalization, as in usage-based approaches.

Prelexical and postlexical features in language production

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Berg
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Word Class ◽  
Aphasic Patient ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Slips Of The Tongue ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Processing Network

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the role of word class and gender during lexical access in language production. It was predicted that word class would constrain lexical access because it acts as the interface between the syntax and the lexicon. Gender, in contrast, should not constrain lexical access because it is a linguistic category that does not correlate with any semantic or syntactic information. These predictions were tested against contextual and noncontextual word substitution errors in a corpus of German slips of the tongue, as well as against verbal paraphasias produced by a German-speaking aphasic patient. The results indicated that in all three subsets, both word class and gender influenced the search through the mental lexicon to a reliable degree, with word class making a greater impact than gender. The model that best captured the empirical effects centered around the distinction between prelexical and postlexical features, assigning word class to the former and gender to the latter group. This distinction could be most naturally implemented in a parallel-interactive processing network. The creation of nodes and connections in this type of model was shown not only to respect functional principles, but also to occur on purely structural grounds. On the assumption that the information would be transmitted more or less reliably from one node to another, the aphasiological and speech error data could be readily accommodated within the same psycholinguistic model.

scholarly journals Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: a cross-sectional study

2001 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Dewaele ◽  
Daniel Véronique
Keyword(s):  
Individual Variation ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Sectional Study ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Psycholinguistic Variables ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Accuracy Rates

An analysis of 519 gender errors (out of 9,378 modifiers) in the advanced French interlanguage of 27 Dutch L1 speakers confirms earlier findings that gender assignment and/or agreement remain problematic for learners at all levels. A hypothesis derived from Pienemann's Processability Theory (1998a) that accuracy rates would be higher for gender agreement in structures involving no exchange of grammatical information between constituents was not confirmed. The analysis of interindividual and intra-individual variation in gender accuracy rates revealed effects from avoidance and generalisation strategies, from linguistic variables, sociobiographical variables and psycholinguistic variables. We argue that gender errors can originate at the lemma level, at the gender node level, or at the lexeme level. Different psycholinguistic scenarios are presented to account for intra-individual variation in gender assignment and agreement.

scholarly journals Early and late bilingual processing of Spanish gender, morphology and gender congruency

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-208
Author(s):  
Irma Alarcón
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Distinct Advantage ◽  
Learning Context ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Bilinguals

The present study investigates whether advanced proficiency-matched early and late bilinguals display gender agreement processing quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of native speakers of Spanish. To address this issue, a timed grammaticality judgment task was used to analyze the effects on accuracy and reaction times of grammatical gender, morphology, and gender congruency of the article and adjective within a noun phrase. Overall results indicated no significant statistical differences between the native speakers and the two bilingual groups. Both early and late bilinguals displayed similar grammatical gender knowledge in their underlying grammars. A detailed examination of the congruency effect, however, revealed that the native speakers, not the bilinguals, displayed sensitivity to gender agreement violations. Moreover, the native and heritage speakers pattern together in accuracy and directionality of gender agreement processing: both were less accurate with incongruent articles than with incongruent adjectives, while the second language learners were equally accurate in both agreement domains. Despite having internalized gender in their implicit grammars, the late bilinguals did not show native-like patterns in real time processing. The present findings suggest that, for high proficiency speakers, there is a distinct advantage for early over late bilinguals in achieving native-like gender lexical access and retrieval. Therefore, age of acquisition, in conjunction with learning context, might be the best predictor of native-like gender agreement processing at advanced and near-native proficiency levels.

scholarly journals The Role of Suffixes in Grammatical Gender Assignment in Modern Greek: A Psycholinguistic Study

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli ◽  
Maria Mastropavlou
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Modern Greek

The Acquisition of Spanish Gender Marking in the Writing of Heritage and Second Language Learners

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-267
Author(s):  
Antonio Pérez-Núñez
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Nonlinear Process ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Written Production ◽  
And Gender

This study aims to expand on previous research on the acquisition of gender marking by examining the longitudinal written production of second language (L2) and heritage language (HL) learners. The written production of 24 participants (L2, n = 12; HL, n = 12) enrolled in the same course was traced over four weeks and all cases of canonical and non-canonical gender marking (i.e., gender assignment and gender agreement) were coded. The group results indicated that the HL learners were significantly more accurate than their L2 counterparts with both canonical and non-canonical ending nouns; however, close inspection of the participants’ individual accuracy patterns revealed a nonlinear process that was subject to great instability in their performance over time. Findings are discussed in light of interlanguage development and implications for research in second language acquisition are presented.

scholarly journals Gender Agreement in Online Versus Classroom Students of First-Semester Spanish

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana María Díaz Collazos ◽  
David Vásquez Hurtado
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Delivery Mode ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Online Students ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Blended Course

AbstractThe goal of this paper is to compare the learning outcomes of beginning online students (n=14) of Spanish with classroom students engaged in a hybrid or blended course (n=19). All students were native speakers of English. Some studies show that online students perform better than classroom students, while other studies show no significant differences. All previous studies use general measurements of proficiency or scoring instead of examining particular differences within specific linguistic elements. This paper focuses on gender agreement and gathers acquisitionist research on the matter to weight the factors that affect its learning in online and classroom students. We extracted 2777 tokens from writing tasks and performed multivariate analysis using Rbrul (Johnson) to test gender accuracy against delivery mode and linguistic factors such as animacy, morphological endings and gender assignment of the noun, as well as the grammatical category of the agreeing word. Results suggest that the delivery mode does not play a role in the overall performance of online versus classroom students. However, classroom students perform better with animate nouns, while online students do so in a non-significant manner. Physical presence of people may favor the learning of gender agreement with animate referents.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document