scholarly journals The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Arabic Demonstratives by English Native Speakers

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Anwar Saad Aljadani
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Functional Features ◽  
Gender System

Recently, an increase interest in the acquisition of grammatical gender by second language (L2) learners has been revealed. This paper investigated the acquisition of Arabic, a language that has a rich grammatical gender system, by speakers of a first language (L1) that does not have gender (English). Arabic demonstrative pronouns selected as the linguistic feature to be investigated.  Due to the gender differentiations, Arabic has nearly ten demonstrative pronouns whereas English has four demonstrative pronouns. Consequently, learnability considerations, the Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA) hypothesis presumes that English learners of Arabic will have the ability to acquire L2 grammatical gender despite the absence of these systems in their L1. However, the Failed Functional Features (FFF) hypothesis predicts that English learners of Arabic cannot acquire these systems since they are not available in their L1. This paper investigated the ability of English learners of Arabic in acquiring the Arabic demonstrative pronouns with their gender as accurate as native speakers of Arabic do. Moreover, does the proficiency level play a role in the acquisition of demonstratives? Finally, which hypothesis will be supported by the findings? It was found that L2 learners did not acquire the phenomenon as accurate as the native speakers did. Furthermore, proficiency level played a role in the acquisition of demonstratives as a significant disparity between L2 learners’ levels was appeared. Finally, the current outcomes could be attributed to FT/FA hypothesis.

Grammatical gender processing in L2 speakers of Spanish

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Halberstadt ◽  
Jorge R. Valdés Kroff ◽  
Paola E. Dussias
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Gender Information ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
L1 Use ◽  
Gender Processing

Abstract 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.

Transfer effects in learning a second language grammatical gender system

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Sabourin ◽  
Laurie A. Stowe ◽  
Ger J. de Haan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Similar System ◽  
Gender System ◽  
L1 And L2

In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch coming from a historically similar system. The Romance languages have grammatical gender; however, the system is not congruent to the Dutch system. English does not have grammatical gender (although semantic gender is marked in the pronoun system). Experiment 1, a simple gender assignment task, showed that all L2 participants tested could assign the correct gender to Dutch nouns (all L2 groups performing on average above 80%), although having gender in the L1 did correlate with higher accuracy, particularly when the gender systems were very similar. Effects of noun familiarity and a default gender strategy were found for all participants. In Experiment 2 agreement between the noun and the relative pronoun was investigated. In this task a distinct performance hierarchy was found with the German group performing the best (though significantly worse than native speakers), the Romance group performing well above chance (though not as well as the German group), and the English group performing at chance. These results show that L2 acquisition of grammatical gender is affected more by the morphological similarity of gender marking in the L1 and L2 than by the presence of abstract syntactic gender features in the L1.

Processing of grammatical gender in French as a first and second language: Evidence from ERPs

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 76-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Frenck-Mestre ◽  
Alice Foucart ◽  
Haydee Carrasco-Ortiz ◽  
Julia Herschensohn
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Language Background ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Phonetic Cues

The present study examined the processing of grammatical gender in second language (L2) French as a function of language background (Experiment 1) and as a function of overt phonetic properties of agreement (Experiment 2) by examining Event Related Potential (ERP) responses to gender discord in L2 French. In Experiment 1 we explored the role of the presence/absence of abstract grammatical gender in the L1 (gendered German, ungendered English): we compared German and English learners of French when processing post-nominal plural (no gender cues on determiner) attributive adjectives that either agreed in gender with the noun or presented a gender violation. We found grammaticalized responses (P600) by native and L1 English learners, but no response by German L1, a result we attribute to the possible influence of plurality, which is gender neutralized in German DP concord. In Experiment 2, we examined the role of overt phonetic cues to noun-adjective gender agreement in French, for both native speakers and Spanish L2 learners of French, finding that both natives and L2 learners showed a more robust P600 in the presence of phonetic cues. These data, in conjunction with those of other ERP studies can best be accounted for by a model that allows for native language influence, that is not, however constrained by age of acquisition, and that must also allow for clear cues in the input to influence acquisition and/or processing.

scholarly journals The problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima A. Alkohlani
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Considerable Difficulty ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Problematic Issue ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Gender System

AbstractMany languages of the world have a grammatical gender system that divides all nouns into gendered categories. The gender assigned to a given noun requires gender agreement with associated items in the sentence, such as: determiners, adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns. Research in the area of grammatical gender acquisition has found that this grammatical category poses considerable difficulty for L2 learners. However, rarely was this area of difficulty the focus of L2 studies in Arabic. The present study focuses on the problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language. It examines advanced Arabic L2 learners’ written errors of gender assignment and agreement in the Arabic Learner Corpus (ALC) v2, compiled by Alfaifi, Atwel, and Hedaya (2014). Based on the classification and analysis of the errors, possible factors of the difficulty facing L2 learners in assigning the correct gender are discussed, and recommendations to reduce their effects are suggested.

Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
Peter Auer ◽  
Vanessa Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Immigrant Background ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Germanic Languages

While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).

ABSOLUTE FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEXICAL ACQUISITION

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (04) ◽  
pp. 721-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Crossley ◽  
Stephen Skalicky ◽  
Kristopher Kyle ◽  
Katia Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
English Speaker ◽  
Absolute Frequency ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Frequency Effects ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
L2 Production ◽  
Main Effects

AbstractA number of longitudinal studies of L2 production have reported frequency effects wherein learners' produce more frequent words as a function of time. The current study investigated the spoken output of English L2 learners over a four-month period of time using both native and non-native English speaker frequency norms for both word types and word tokens. The study also controlled for individual differences such as first language distance, English proficiency, gender, and age. Results demonstrated that lower level L2 learners produced more infrequent tokens at the beginning of the study and that high intermediate learners, when compared to advanced learners, produced more infrequent tokens at the beginning of the study and more frequent tokens toward the end of the study. Main effects were also reported for proficiency level, age, and language distance. These results provide further evidence that L2 production may not follow expected frequency trends (i.e., that more infrequent tokens are produced as a function of time).

Grammatical gender-marking ability of multilingual children in French immersion

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 968-983 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaudia Krenca ◽  
Kathleen Hipfner-Boucher ◽  
Xi Chen
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Repeated Measures ◽  
First Language ◽  
French Immersion ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Bilingual Advantage ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Significant Difference

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: We explored the advantage of bilingualism and the effect of linguistic proximity on the acquisition of determiner-noun agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology, in a French immersion setting. To our knowledge, third language acquisition literature has yet to provide evidence of a bilingual advantage in learning a particular feature of morphology in an additional language among young children. Design/methodology/approach: We compared accuracy in determiner-noun agreement on a narrative task in three groups of grade 1 and 2 students ( n = 15 in each group): a group of third language French learners whose first language marked gender, a group of third language French learners whose first language did not mark gender, and a group of English learners learning French as a second language. Data and analysis: If the determiner and the noun agreed in gender, gender on the determiner was considered correct. A repeated measures factorial ANCOVA was carried out to compare the performance among the three language groups on the proportion of correctly marked masculine and feminine nouns. Findings/conclusions: All of the children achieved high levels of accuracy on masculine nouns with no difference among the three language groups on the proportion of correctly marked masculine nouns. There was a significant difference in the proportion of correctly marked feminine nouns in favour of the group whose first language marks gender compared to the other two groups. Originality: The current study supports transfer in the domain of morphology among primary-school-aged children (who are first language speakers of diverse minority languages) in the early stages of third-language French acquisition. Significance/implications: This finding provides preliminary evidence of a bilingual advantage in the domain of morphology among young, emergent trilinguals whose first language and third language share gender marking as a linguistic feature, supporting the linguistic proximity model.

Perspective and Proficiency in L2 Referential Communication

1987 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theo Bongaerts ◽  
Eric Kellerman ◽  
Andy Bentlage
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
Experimental Setting ◽  
Comparable Group ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
Communication Task ◽  
Dyadic Communication ◽  
Repeated Use

In this paper we examine some aspects of second language referential communication in an experimental setting. The research method employed is an adapted version of a dyadic communication task originally devised by Krauss and Weinheimer (1964) and subsequently used in a long series of first language studies with anglophone children and adults. The task requires subjects, who are visually separated but allowed to converse freely, to reach agreement on the ordering of a set of abstract, non-conventional shapes over a number of trials. The learners appear to behave like native speakers in many ways: They can carry out the task successfully, they shorten references on repeated use, they need less time in subsequent trials, and most importantly, they tend to prefer to describe the shapes from an analogical perspective rather than from a literal one. The differences between learners and anglophone native speakers are mainly quantitative in nature. For instance, the learners need more time and more words for the task. Also, their final references tend to be longer and structurally more complex. However, the same was true for a comparable group of Dutch native speakers. Furthermore, one learner group showed behavior that was aberrant and could not be related to proficiency level.

scholarly journals A META-ANALYSIS OF SENSITIVITY TO GRAMMATICAL INFORMATION DURING SELF-PACED READING: TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE FOR READING TIME EFFECT SIZES

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 1055-1087 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Avery ◽  
Emma Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Reading Time ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Time Effect ◽  
Effect Sizes ◽  
L2 Reading ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
L1 Influence

AbstractDespite extensive theoretical and empirical research, we do not have estimations of the magnitude of sensitivity to grammatical information during L2 online processing. This is largely due to reliance on null hypothesis significance testing (Plonsky, 2015). The current meta-analysis draws on data from one elicitation technique, self-paced reading, across 57 studies (N = 3,052), to estimate sensitivity to L2 morphosyntax and how far L1 background moderates this. Overall, we found a reliable sensitivity to L2 morphosyntax at advanced proficiencies (d = .20, 95% CIs .15, .25), with some evidence that this was reliably lower than for native speakers (NSs). These patterns were not generally moderated by linguistic feature or sentence region. However, effects for anomaly detection were larger among NSs than L2 learners and the effects among L2 learners appeared to show a trend toward L1 influence. Finding smaller effects than in other subdomains, we provide an initial framework of reference for L2 reading time effect sizes.

L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy: The typological primacy model

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Rothman
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
English Learners ◽  
First Language ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
L2 Spanish ◽  
L1 English

The present article addresses the following question: what variables condition syntactic transfer? Evidence is provided in support of the position that third language (L3) transfer is selective, whereby, at least under certain conditions, it is driven by the typological proximity of the target L3 measured against the other previously acquired linguistic systems (cf. Rothman and Cabrelli Amaro, 2007, 2010; Rothman, 2010; Montrul et al., 2011). To show this, we compare data in the domain of adjectival interpretation between successful first language (L1) Italian learners of English as a second language (L2) at the low to intermediate proficiency level of L3 Spanish, and successful L1 English learners of L2 Spanish at the same levels for L3 Brazilian Portuguese. The data show that, irrespective of the L1 or the L2, these L3 learners demonstrate target knowledge of subtle adjectival semantic nuances obtained via noun-raising, which English lacks and the other languages share. We maintain that such knowledge is transferred to the L3 from Italian (L1) and Spanish (L2) respectively in light of important differences between the L3 learners herein compared to what is known of the L2 Spanish performance of L1 English speakers at the same level of proficiency (see, for example, Judy et al., 2008; Rothman et al., 2010). While the present data are consistent with Flynn et al.’s (2004) Cumulative Enhancement Model, we discuss why a coupling of these data with evidence from other recent L3 studies suggests necessary modifications to this model, offering in its stead the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) for multilingual transfer.

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