Search Results (4)

Why is learning the gender of nouns so difficult for some bilinguals? We test the hypothesis that different language learning backgrounds or life experience with Spanish determine how learners follow different morphosyntactic cues for gender assignment in Spanish by testing learners with early and late language experience in an experiment with invented nouns. A total of 44 monolingually raised native speakers, 44 heritage speakers, and 44 L2 learners of Spanish were trained to learn 24 nonce words in Spanish presented in four input conditions that manipulated the number and type of cues to gender marking (determiner, word marker, adjective). After the learning sessions, the participants completed a word naming task, an elicited production task, and a debriefing questionnaire. The L2 learners were different than native speakers and heritage speakers in learning nonce nouns. They used morphosyntactic cues differently, relying on adjectives as their most-used strategy to assign gender, unlike native speakers and heritage speakers who used all cues. Our findings confirm processing differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers and suggest language learning background determines how learners discover reliable morphosyntactic cues to the gender of nouns in the input. Full article

This article deals with lexical borrowing and the morphological integration of loan words in Kaliardá, a Greek-based antilanguage, spoken in the urban areas of Greece by socially marginalized communities of cross-dressers, transgender people, and gay men. It is shown that the accommodation of most loans follows the general rules of Modern Greek morphology, namely, the stem-based word formation and compulsory inflection. However, for a considerable part of the borrowed items, there are certain morphological deviances compared to loan formation in Greek. More particularly, there is an overuse of the feminine grammatical gender, assigned to -human nouns, contrary to a neuterization tendency displayed by the Greek language, while the masculine grammatical gender is scarcely employed, and a significant number of feminine loans end in -o and -u in the citation form. Verbal loans do not substantially differ from those in Greek, with the exception of the frequent use of verbal periphrastic formations, consisting of an auxiliary inflected verb type, avélo or vuélo (both loans themselves), and a nominal item. Sometimes, avélo is also employed as a mediator for the integration of English verbs. The data under examination are drawn from a Kaliardá dictionary. Their accuracy is checked with 10 Kaliardá speakers in 2 big Greek cities, Athens and Patras, and they are enriched by a small oral corpus of 32 words collected through interviews. The investigated data comprise items from Italian, French and English, three principal donor languages in Kaliardá, but there are also loans from other languages, mainly from Romani and Turkish, but also from Albanian, German and Spanish. Full article

Recent research into grammatical gender from the perspective of information theory has shown how seemingly arbitrary gender systems can ease processing demands by guiding lexical prediction. When the gender of a noun is revealed in a preceding element, the list of possible candidates is reduced to the nouns assigned to that gender. This strategy can be particularly effective if it eliminates words that are likely to compete for activation against the intended word. We propose syntax as the crucial context within which words must be disambiguated, hypothesizing that syntactically similar words should be less likely to share a gender cross-linguistically. We draw on recent work on syntactic information in the lexicon to define the syntactic distribution of a word as a probability vector of its participation in various dependency relations, and we extract such relations for 32 languages from the Universal Dependencies Treebanks. Correlational and mixed-effects regression analyses reveal that syntactically similar nouns are less likely to share a gender, the opposite pattern that is found for semantically and orthographically similar words. We interpret this finding as a design feature of language, and this study adds to a growing body of research attesting to the ways in which functional pressures on learning, memory, production, and perception shape the lexicon in different ways. Full article

Gender has been extensively studied in Spanish heritage speakers. However, lexical frequency effects have yet to be explored in depth. This study aimed to uncover the extent to which lexical frequency affects the acquisition of gender assignment and gender agreement and to account for possible factors behind heritage language variability. Thirty-nine English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish completed a lexical knowledge screening task (Multilingual Naming Test (MiNT)) along with an elicited production task (EPT), a forced choice task (FCT), and a self-rating lexical frequency task (SRLFT). Heritage speakers performed more successfully with high-frequency lexical items in both the EPT and the FCT, which examined their acquisition of gender assignment and gender agreement, respectively. Noun canonicity also affected their performance in both tasks. However, heritage speakers presented differences between tasks—we found an overextension of the masculine as well as productive vocabulary knowledge effects in the EPT, whereas the FCT showed an overextension of the feminine and no productive vocabulary knowledge effects. We suggest that lexical frequency, determined by the SRLFT, and productive vocabulary knowledge, as measured by the MiNT, account for the variability in the acquisition of gender assignment but not on gender agreement, supporting previous claims that production is more challenging than comprehension for bilinguals. Full article