concordancia

Resumen:

This eye-tracking study examined how heritage speakers of Spanish process gender agreement morphology at a distance, focusing on the activation of the gender feature during sentence processing. Previous work is conceptually replicated and further extended by assessing (1) whether reduced sensitivity to gender agreement mismatches when another word intervenes between the head noun and its modifying adjective stems from weakened gender feature activation, (2) whether a gender-marked determiner enhances this activation, and (3) whether Age of Onset of Bilingualism (AOB) plays a role in this activation. Fifty-three English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish and a comparison group of 32 Spanish-dominant monolingually...

Measuring Adult Heritage Language Lexical Proficiency for Studies on Facilitative Processing of Gender

Zuzanna Fuchs, Emma Kealey, Esra Eldem-Tunc (2025)

Languages

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Resumen:

The present study analyzes individual differences in the facilitative processing of grammatical gender by heritage speakers of Spanish, asking whether these differences correlate with lexical proficiency. Results from an eye-tracking study in the Visual World Paradigm replicate prior findings that, as a group, heritage speakers of Spanish show facilitative processing of gender. Importantly, in a follow-up within-group analysis, we test whether three measures of lexical proficiency—oral picture-naming, verbal fluency, and LexTALE—predict individual performance. We find that lexical proficiency, as measured by LexTALE, predicts overall word recognition; however, we observe no effects of the other measures and no...

Who does it better? The acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender by L1 English and L1 Russian adults

Tamara Gómez Carrero, Anastasiia Ogneva (2024)

Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: adquisición de segundas lenguas

Resumen:

This study addresses the acquisition of second language (L2) Spanish grammatical gender by native speakers of two typologically different languages: English (n = 39) and Russian (n = 37). We aim to explore if the presence or absence of gender features in the first language (L1) influences the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender. Participants completed an acceptability judgment task consisting of 40 sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish Determiner Phrases (DPs). They included masculine and feminine Ns (Nouns) with transparent or opaque endings. Our findings show that (1) both groups are sensitive to gender non-matching structures, although L1 Russian speakers gave the lowest scores to ungrammatical structures in Spanish; (2) higher rating scores to masculine matching DPs point to the use of masculine as default by...

The effects of proactive form-focused instruction and individual differences on second language acquisition

Andrew H. Lee (2024)

Language Teaching Research

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: enseñanza/aprendizaje de la gramática

Resumen:

This study investigated the extent to which second language (L2) learners benefited from proactive form-focused instruction (FFI) targeting French grammatical gender attribution and the degree to which L2 learners' attention control and working memory predicted their learning gains. A total of 102 L2 learners received either proactive FFI targeting French grammatical gender attribution or their regular instruction (i.e. control condition) for six 80-minute instructional sessions. A pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest were administered, each entailing binary-choice, text-completion, picture-description, and listening tasks. The L2 learners also completed the Simon Test and the Corsi Block-Tapping Test, which measured their attention control and working memory. Results showed that L2 learners receiving the proactive...

Variability in the Online Processing of Subject–Verb Number Agreement in Spanish as a Heritage Language: The Role of Lexical Frequency

Jill Jegerski, Sara Fernández Cuenca (2025)

Languages

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Resumen:

This eye tracking study examined the role of lexical frequency in the processing of non-local verbal number agreement by heritage speakers of Spanish. Few prior studies of heritage bilingualism have investigated the role of word frequency in the comprehension or production of morphosyntax, and none have employed a real-time measure of sentence processing, despite the well-known sensitivity of such methods to word frequency and the proposal of some scholars that such online methodologies could be particularly useful in research on heritage speakers. Fifty heritage speakers of Spanish read stimulus sentences containing non-local verbal number agreement that depended on a verb that was either high or low frequency,...

Morfosintaxis del español de hablantes de herencia angloparlantes en Castilla y León

Juan Pablo Orejudo González (2025)

ELUA: Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Resumen:

El español como lengua de herencia en Estados Unidos y su interacción con el inglés ha sido ampliamente estudiado desde hace décadas. En dicho contexto, la lengua familiar es el español, que se ve influida por la lengua mayoritaria, el inglés. En Castilla y León (España) también hay contextos de habla familiares en los que el español interactúa con el inglés. Sin embargo, en estos ambientes la lengua familiar es el inglés y la lengua mayoritaria es el español, es decir, se produce la situación inversa. Por esta razón, conviene reflexionar sobre si los procesos de erosión ampliamente estudiados en el español de herencia de EE.UU. son similares a los del español de hablantes angloparlantes en España. Así, en...

Noun canonicity in heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish

Dámaris Mayans (2023)

ELUA: Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Resumen:

The present investigation examines the role of Spanish noun gender-correlated endings when accessing gender agreement in two different linguistic populations: Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish. This study analyzed data from 34 monolingual speakers of Spanish from the Dominican Republic and 44 heritage speakers of Spanish born in the United States who completed a picture naming task in Experiment 1 (determiner-noun agreement) and a picture description task in Experiment 2 (noun-adjective agreement). Results found that canonicity, particularly overt gender marking cues, seemed to have a facilitatory effect for monolingual speakers as seen by significantly faster...

On the relationship between epistemology and methodology: A reanalysis of grammatical gender in additional-language Spanish

Aarnes Gudmestad (2020)

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: capítulo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: enseñanza/aprendizaje de lenguas

Resumen:

In the current study I explore the relationship between epistemology and methodology through a reanalysis of production data on grammatical gender in additionallanguage Spanish that were analysed in Gudmestad et al. (2019). This reanalysis consists of a shift in the epistemology from the one adopted by Gudmestad et al., where gender marking, which occurs between nouns and both determiners and adjectives, is a unified linguistic phenomenon. In contrast, the assumption in the present investigation is that the acquisition of gender marking entails learning gender assignment and gender agreement, two different learning processes that are observable in language behaviour with determiners and adjectives, respectively. In order to reflect critically on the relationship between epistemology and methodology and specifically on its influence on...

Adjectival and verbal agreement in the oral production of early and late bilinguals. Fluency, complexity, and integrated knowledge

Irma Alarcón (2021)

Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada

Detalles Cerrar ✕

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: adquisición de segundas lenguas

Resumen:

Extended oral production has seldom been used to explore adjectival and verbal agreement in L2 Spanish. This study examines oral narrations to compare the agreement behavior, speech rates, and patterns of errors of highly proficient Spanish heritage and L2 learners (early and late bilinguals, respectively), whose L1 is English, with those of native controls. Although both bilingual groups displayed high agreement accuracy scores, only the early bilinguals performed at or close to ceiling. In addition, the L2 learners spoke significantly more slowly than the heritage and native speakers, who displayed similar speech rates. Explanations accounting for the differences in speech rates and agreement accuracy include age of acquisition of Spanish, syntactic distance between a noun and its adjective, and task effects. All of these factors...

Grammatical gender processing in L2 speakers of Spanish

Lauren Halberstadt, Jorge R. Valdés Kroff, Paola E. Dussias (2018)

Journal of Second Language Studies

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: estudios de género

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...