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LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC CONGRUENCY IN L2 PREDICTIVE GENDER PROCESSING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2016

Holger Hopp  and
Natalia Lemmerth
Holger Hopp*
Affiliation:
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Natalia Lemmerth
Affiliation:
Universität Mannheim
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Holger Hopp, English Linguistics, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Bienroder Weg 80, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany. E-mail: h.hopp@tu-bs.de
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Abstract

This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that is, whether a noun (“house”) is assigned to the same or a different gender class. Further, gender is syntactically realized on postnominal suffixes in Russian but on prenominal articles in German. For adjectives, both Russian and German mark gender on suffixes. In predictive gender processing, we find interactions of proficiency and congruency for gender-marked articles. Advanced L2 learners show nativelike gender prediction throughout. High-intermediate learners display asymmetries according to syntactic and lexical congruency. Predictive gender processing obtains for all nouns in the (syntactically congruent) adjective condition, yet only for lexically congruent nouns in the (syntactically incongruent) article condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 171 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the audiences at ISBPAC 2016 in Kaiserslautern and BUCLD 41 for helpful comments. Further, we are grateful to three anonymous reviewers and the editors of SSLA for providing constructive criticism which significantly helped us in improving the paper. All errors remain our responsibility.

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