Gender agreement in L3 English by Basque/Spanish bilinguals

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ainara Imaz Agirre ◽  
María del Pilar García Mayo

This study investigates knowledge of the nominal agreement domain in L3 English by Basque/Spanish bilinguals. Gender agreement has been claimed to be an interpretable feature in English and could be claimed to be so for Basque, whereas Spanish shows uninterpretable gender agreement. Under current representational and computational accounts posited to explain variability in L2 learner production, interpretable features are acquirable. The participants in the present study (n=34) were Basque/Spanish bilinguals of two proficiency levels in English (intermediate and advanced) and a control group of English native speakers (n=17). They completed two oral production tasks (elicitation and picture narration tasks). Results from both tasks indicate that Basque/Spanish bilinguals seem to have acquired gender agreement in L3 English but still have production problems which could be explained on the basis of linguistic features (animacy) and gender attraction effects of the Spanish head noun as well as the different proficiency levels.

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvina Montrul ◽  
Israel de la Fuente ◽  
Justin Davidson ◽  
Rebecca Foote

This study examined whether type of early language experience provides advantages to heritage speakers over second language (L2) learners with morphology, and investigated knowledge of gender agreement and its interaction with diminutive formation. Diminutives are a hallmark of Child Directed Speech in early language development and a highly productive morphological mechanism that facilitates the acquisition of declensional noun endings in many languages (Savickienė and Dressler, 2007). In Spanish, diminutives regularize gender marking in nouns with a non-canonical ending. Twenty-four Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers and 37 L2 learners with intermediate to advanced proficiency completed two picture-naming tasks and an elicited production task. Results showed that the heritage speakers were more accurate than the L2 learners with gender agreement in general, and with non-canonical ending nouns in particular. This study confirms that early language experience and the type of input received confer some advantages to heritage speakers over L2 learners with early-acquired aspects of language, especially in oral production.


2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Foote

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present study was to examine the role of morphophonological cues to gender in the production of gender agreement in native speakers and second language learners of Spanish in light of the Marking and Morphing account of agreement (Eberhard et al., 2005). Participants repeated and completed complex subject noun phrases with head nouns that varied in gender and gender-marking transparency. Analyses of accuracy rates along with Marking and Morphing model simulations of the results indicated that, contrary to previous findings, native speakers were not affected by gender-marking transparency. However, based on model simulations, second language (L2) learners were affected by the morphophonological form of the head noun.


2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. 1870-1887 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Gillon Dowens ◽  
Marta Vergara ◽  
Horacio A. Barber ◽  
Manuel Carreiras

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English–Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2 present or not present in the first language (number and gender agreement, respectively) were manipulated at two different sentence positions—within and across phrases. The results for a control group of age-matched native-speaker Spanish participants included an ERP pattern of LAN-type early negativity followed by P600 effect in response to both agreement violations and for both sentence positions. The late L2 learner results included a similar pattern, consisting of early negativity followed by P600, in the first sentence position (within-phrase agreement violations) but only P600 effects in the second sentence position (across-phrase agreement violation), as well as significant amplitude and onset latency differences between the gender and the number violation effects in both sentence positions. These results reveal that highly proficient learners can show electrophysiological correlates during L2 processing that are qualitatively similar to those of native speakers, but the results also indicate the contribution of factors such as age of acquisition and transfer processes from first language to L2.


Author(s):  
Paz Gonzalez ◽  
Damaris Mayans ◽  
Huub van den Bergh

Abstract Inflectional morphology causes persistent difficulties for second language (L2) learners (Montrul, Silvina & Kim Potowski. 2007. Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 11(3). 301–328; Montrul, Silvina, Israel de la Fuente, Justin Davidson & Rebecca Foote. 2013. The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers. Second Language Research 29(1). 87–118). Learners operate with a default gender value, and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners and modifiers (White, Lydia, Elena Valenzuela, Martyna Kozlowska-Macgregor & Ingrid Leung. 2004. Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 25(1). 105–133; Schlig 2003). 111 essays written were collected containing 799 correct uses and 281 errors from Dutch students whose written ability in Spanish is A2 (Common European Framework). The results show that singular masculine nominal agreement marking at the determiner is significantly better produced by Dutch L2 learners of Spanish than when the marking of nominal agreement is plural, feminine or at the adjective. This study corroborates the previous results where learners operate with a default gender value and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners. Also these results show that L2 learners of Spanish are significantly less accurate in gender agreement with adjectives than with determiners.


2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMANUEL BYLUND ◽  
SCOTT JARVIS

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nüse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish bilinguals (all near-native speakers of Swedish). Spanish and Swedish differ as regards grammatical aspect: whereas Swedish lacks this grammatical category, Spanish conveys aspect through verbal morphology and periphrasis. The principal aim of the study was to explore the relationship between productive event conceptualization patterns and receptive decoding proficiency related to aspectual contrasts. The participants were asked to provide oral L1 Spanish descriptions of video clips projecting motion events with different degrees of endpoint orientation (see von Stutterheim, 2003). In addition, they took a grammaticality judgment test concerning verb and gender agreement, verbal clitics and aspectual contrasts. Compared with baseline data from monolingual Spanish speakers, the results on endpoint encoding show that the bilinguals mention the endpoints of motion events to a higher degree than the Spanish control group does. Moreover, it was shown that the weaker the bilinguals' discrimination of aspectual errors on the grammaticality judgment test, the more prone they were to encoding endpoints. This result consequently furthers the hypothesis about the interconnectedness between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization. The results were further interpreted as indicating that the bilinguals are influenced by the Swedish-like tendency to attend to the boundedness rather than the ongoingness of events.


Author(s):  
Paul A. Malovrh

AbstractThe present study investigates the effect of mode on number and gender agreement in third-person direct object clitics produced by three different levels of native- English L2 learners of Spanish (N = 76). Previous research supports a performancedeficit account of variability, showing that proficiency level and working memory affect L2 morphological agreement (Sagarra 2007 and Sagarra & Herschensohn 2010), and that L2 processing patterns are similar to those of the L1 (Hopp 2010), suggesting that gender inflection is attainable. The present study extends such research. Using film retell tasks, data deriving from oral and written production under identical task conditions were correlated with less and more access to working memory, respectively. Analyses revealed main effects for both variables; patterns of agreement in oral production were also evident in written production, but at earlier stages of development. Results support a performance-based account of variability, showing that mode affects gender agreement, but not number.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Leila Ahmadpour ◽  
Hassan Asadollahfam

The present study is an endeavor to explore the potential of dynamic assessment (DA) as a way of scaffolding English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ oral production. Although the literature on dynamic assessment is rich with studies focused on language components and skills such as vocabulary, reading, and writing, very few studies have attempted to examine the role of dynamic assessment in fostering real-time oral production. It is assumed that assessment of learners’ oral production need not focus solely on evaluation; rather, learners need to determine their weaknesses and try to compensate for them with the help of a more knowledgeable peer. Therefore, the present study also focused on evaluating the role of DA in Iranian EFL learners’ oral narrative task performances in the classroom. Furthermore, an attempt was made to explore the role of gender in the production of mediated narratives. For this purpose, a total of 60 students from two private universities were assigned to two intact classes: One class served as the experimental group, which was exposed to teachers’ mediation in learners’ narrative productions, and the other group functioned as the control group and received no such mediation for their oral narrative language production. The overall speech quality of learners’ production from each narrative over the treatment period provided the required data. The results were analyzed through independent samples t-tests, which revealed significant effects of both group and gender differences. The experimental learners, as expected, were able to progress and cultivate their oral production abilities after having been exposed to DA. Regarding gender, male participants were more successful in terms of enhanced second language oral production. The study has significant implications for the integration of DA into learners’ oral production, suggesting that EFL narrative production is a skill that is highly anxiety-provoking for learners.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Azevedo Floripi ◽  
Ideneida Moreno

Baseado em diversas investigações que se tem a respeito da marcação de concordância do português brasileiro (PB), buscamos comparar o comportamento do PB com o da língua cabo-verdiana ou o caboverdiano (CV), no que concerne aos padrões de marcação da concordância de número e gênero. Em decorrência das verificações encontradas, comparamos o comportamento do caboverdiano e do português brasileiro não-padrão, dado que as duas línguas aparentam ter um comportamento semelhante quanto aos padrões de aplicação da concordância nominal. Tomamos como fundamento as pesquisas sobre o assunto no português brasileiro (cf. SCHERRE; NARO, 1998; SCHERRE, 1994) e a pesquisa de Costa e Figueiredo Silva (2006) sobre padrões de concordância do português brasileiro e europeu. Desse modo, o objeto de nosso trabalho é realizar um mapeamento do comportamento da concordância interna ao sintagma nominal no caboverdiano (cf. CARDOSO, 2005), tendo como base de comparação a língua portuguesa.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Morfologia. Concordância nominal. Sintagma Nominal. Caboverdiano.ABSTRACT Based on some researches about the agreement processes in Brazilian Portuguese, we intend to make a comparison between BP and CV related to the patterns of nominal and gender agreement. Using the results of this study we could build a comparison between the Cabeverdian and non standard Brazilian Portuguese since these two languages reveal a similar performance related to the nominal agreement process. We adopt some researches about this nominal agreement process in Brazilian Portuguese (cf. SCHERRE; NARO 1998 and SCHERRE, 1994) and also the study made by Costa and figueiredo Silva (2006) which investigates the patterns of application of agreement in Brazilian and European Portuguese. Thus, we intend to show the nominal agreement internal to the DP in Cabeverdian (cf. CARDOSO, 2005) in comparison to the Brazilian Portuguese pattern. KEYWORDS: Morphology; Nominal agreement; Nominal phrase; Cabeverdian.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Sri Evi New Yearsi Pangadongan ◽  
Agustina Rahyu ◽  
Selvy Pasulu

Bronchial Asthma generally starts from childhood which is condition where respiration channel experiences constriction because of hyperactivity with some specific stimulation which cause inflammation. Some risk factors are smoking exposure of cigarette smoke, weather changes, mite on house dirt, pet and history of family sickness. The purpose of this research is to know Relation of mite on house dirt, exposure of cigarette smoke  and history of family sickness with bronchial asthma incident to child 5 – 10  years old on working area of Puskesmas Lempake Samarinda City in 2016. Method which used was analytic survey with Case Control approaching. The total sample was 36 children which consisted of 18 case group and 18 control group with matching by using age and gender which submitted with Purposive Sampling technique. Data Analysis used Chi Square with wrong degree α = 0,005. The result showed that there was relation of mite of house dirt (p = 0,006), history of family sickness (p = 0,001) and no relation with exposure of cigarette smoke (p = 0,370) with bronchial asthma incident to child 5 – 10 years old on working area of Puskesmas Lempake Samarinda City in 2016.


2019 ◽  
Vol 133 (03) ◽  
pp. 220-223
Author(s):  
S Üstün Bezgin ◽  
T Çakabay ◽  
K Irak ◽  
M Koçyiğit ◽  
B Serin Keskineğe ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectiveThis study aimed to examine nasal mucociliary clearance time in patients with Helicobacter pylori infection.MethodsFifty patients who were newly diagnosed with H pylori infection using gastric biopsy in the gastroenterology out-patient clinic, and 50 age- and gender-matched healthy adults who were admitted to the otorhinolaryngology out-patient clinic, were included in this study. After an otorhinolaryngological examination (anterior rhinoscopy and nasal endoscopic examination), the nasal mucociliary clearance time of each subject was calculated using the saccharine test.ResultsThe mean mucociliary clearance time was 06:29 ± 3:31 minutes (range, 00:55–15:19 minutes) in the control group and 10:12 ± 06:09 minutes (range, 01:28–32:00 minutes) in the study group. Comparisons of the two groups revealed a statistically significant difference (p = 0.002).ConclusionNasal mucociliary clearance time was significantly increased in patients with H pylori infection. The results suggest that H pylori infection may have an unfavourable effect on nasal mucociliary clearance.


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