A pervasive question in second language (L2) research is whether L2 learners can acquire parameterized functional features that are not instantiated in their first language (L1). While some researchers have argued for a representational deficit (e.g., Clahsen & Muysken, 1989; Hawkins & Chan, 1997), claiming that L2 learners’ competence is fundamentally deficient, others have argued that learners can indeed acquire features that are not instantiated in their L1 (e.g., Prévost & White, 2000; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), and ascribe any optionality to communication pressure or other external factors. In this dissertation, grammatical gender agreement was used as a test case to determine if L2 Spanish learners (L1 = English) can indeed acquire a parametrized feature not present in their L1. Many researchers that investigate grammatical gender agreement do not have a principled reason for investigating a particular type of agreement (e.g., determiner-noun, noun-adjective). It may be the case, though, that not all types of agreement are equally difficult for L2 learners. In studies that investigate whether L2 learners have a representational deficit for grammatical gender agreement, it is therefore impossible to conclude whether learners truly have a representational deficit, or whether they are performing poorly because of the type of agreement under investigation. Therefore, this dissertation tests grammatical gender agreement in three different syntactic contexts that are commonly used in this type of research: determiner-noun (DET-N), noun-adjective (N-ADJ) and null nominal (N-DROP). These syntactic contexts were hypothesized to differ in difficulty for L2 learners, with DET-N being the easiest and N-DROP the most difficult.Native Spanish speakers and L2 learners read a series of sentences embedded with violations of these three different types of grammatical gender agreement while their eye-movements were recorded with an eye-tracker. Participants’ sensitivity was measured both via reading times and self-reports on a post-reading questionnaire. Linear mixed-effects models indicated that native Spanish speakers were sensitive to all three types of grammatical gender agreement, as evidenced by longer reading times on ungrammatical relative to grammatical areas of interest, but L2 Spanish learners were sensitive only to DET-N agreement, and not N-ADJ and N-DROP agreement. The self-reports paralleled these findings, with L2 learners reporting a higher instance of seeing DET-N agreement violations than N-ADJ and N-DROP violations in the experimental stimuli. These results indicate that the L2 learners likely do not have a representational deficit for grammatical gender agreement, and that the type of grammatical gender agreement under investigation matters, as the syntactic context of the agreement may affect performance. Results are discussed in terms of the types of knowledge L2 learners use during online processing in studies that detect sensitivity to grammatical violations.
Read
