Grammatical gender in adolescent German learners of Spanish as a foreign language: Evidence from production and online perception

Wolf, Johanna ; Terlaak, Clara und Schimke, Sarah (2025): Grammatical gender in adolescent German learners of Spanish as a foreign language: Evidence from production and online perception. In: Ampersand, Bd. 14, 100217

Abstract

The acquisition of grammatical gender is known to be a difficult and error-prone process in second and foreign language learning. The current study sheds new light on this topic by looking at elicited narrative production data as well as at data from an eyetracking-during- reading and a controlled gender production task. Participants were German-speaking adolescent learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Our results suggest that learners are often successful in assigning gender and marking agreement, and that they are sensitive to agreement errors during reading. Moreover, we found a relation between the sensitivity that learners displayed to agreement relations during reading and their accuracy of gender markings in a production task with unrelated and more challenging lexical items. We conclude that sensitivity to gender markings during input processing facilitates the acquisition of the category, and that this sensitivity is high in adolescent learners and for a relative transparent gender system as present in Spanish.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften > Department 1 > Germanistik > Sprachwissenschaft
• Themengebiete: 400 Sprache > 410 Linguistik
• ISSN: 2215-0390
• Sprache: Englisch