Tipo: artículo

Temas: artículo investigación

Resumen:

Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. 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. 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. Participants were English learners of Spanish and Spanish...

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Tipo: artículo

Temas: artículo cognados

Resumen:

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According to Hopp?s Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, difficulties in second language (L2) lexical processing may lead to non-target syntactic computations. In line with this hypothesis, cognates ? which are processed faster than non-cognates, as defined by the cognate facilitation effect ? can ease L2 syntactic processing. In order to investigate whether cognates additionally facilitate L2 syntax learning, we had two groups of Spanish natives learn an artificial language drawing on Basque. Each group explicitly learnt a set of either Spanish?Basque cognates or non-cognates and a word order grammatical rule. Then, two sentence?picture matching tasks tested their ability to apply the rule (1) with cognates vs. non-cognates...

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