Rebecca Foote

Integrated knowledge of agreement in early and late English–Spanish bilinguals

Research suggests that late bilinguals may have persistent difficulties with the automatic access and use of some second language structures because of a lack of underlying integrated knowledge of those structures. In contrast, early bilinguals show advantages in aspects of language use that require this type of automatic knowledge. This study investigated whether early and late English–Spanish bilinguals evidence integrated knowledge of agreement in Spanish by examining their sensitivity to agreement errors while reading for comprehension. The results of a pilot and two experiments indicate that both early and late bilinguals do possess integrated knowledge of subject–verb number agreement and noun–adjective gender agreement in Spanish, although sensitivity to agreement errors interacts with properties of the experimental stimuli.

Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish heritage speakers

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition experiments involving gender monitoring, grammaticality judgment, and word repetition. All three experimental tasks required participants to listen to grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish noun phrases (determiner-adjective-noun) but systematically varied the type of response required of them. The results of the Gender Monitoring Task (GMT) and the Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) revealed significant grammaticality effects for all groups in accuracy and speed, but in the Word Repetition Task (WRT), the native speakers and the heritage speakers showed a grammaticality effect, while the L2 learners did not. Noun canonicity greatly affected processing in the two experimental groups. We suggest that input frequency and reduced language use affect retrieval of non-canonical ending nouns from declarative memory in L2 learners and heritage speakers more so than in native speakers. Native-like processing of gender in the WRT by the heritage speakers is likely related to context of acquisition and particular experience with oral production.

The role of morphology in subject–verb number agreement: A comparison of Mexican and Dominican Spanish

The goal of the present study was to test the predictions of two contrasting claims about the role of morphology in subject–verb number agreement production. According to the maximalist view described by Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema, and Kolk, languages with relatively rich inflectional morphology may be more susceptible to the influence of notional number due to the penetration of meaning into the agreement process. An alternative proposed by Eberhard, Cutting, and Bock predicts the opposite: Languages with richer inflectional morphology are less susceptible to notional number because inflectional morphemes filter the effect of number meaning. In the present experiments, utterances differing in notional number properties were elicited from speakers of two varieties of Spanish that vary in morphological richness. In Experiment 1, participants formed sentences with overt subjects. In Experiment 2, they produced sentences with null subjects. Results supported the hypothesis that richer morphology reduces notional effects during agreement production, both within and across languages.

Age of acquisition interactions in bilingual lexical access: A study of the weaker language of L2 learners and heritage speakers

Global age of acquisition of L1 and L2 in individual speakers has been investigated as a deterministic factor in nativelikeness of grammatical knowledge and lexical processing. The age of acquisition of individual words has also been shown to affect both native and nonnative lexical access. Given the centrality of the lexicon to language acquisition and use, this study investigated which of these variables is most relevant and how these two variables may potentially interact during lexical access of the less dominant language in bilinguals. A group of English-speaking late L2 learners of Spanish and a group of early bilingual speakers who were exposed to Spanish as an L1 at home and learned English in childhood (heritage speakers) completed a lexical decision task in Spanish and an English–Spanish translation decision task. The performance of the two groups, which vary on global age of acquisition of Spanish, but not on language dominance, was compared. The results indicated no differences in the overall accuracy of lexical access according to global age of acquisition of L1 and L2, though the L2 learners responded more quickly than the heritage speakers in both tasks. The results differed within each participant group depending on word age of acquisition, with heritage speakers showing a speed and accuracy advantage for words learned early in L1 Spanish and L2 learners showing an advantage for words learned early in L2 Spanish. Based on these findings, it is argued that it is the language experience along with word age of acquisition that determines lexical processing of the weaker language, whether in L1 or L2.

Age of Acquisition and Proficiency as Factors in Language Production: Agreement in Bilinguals.

Research on the production of subject–verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the framework of Eberhard, Cutting and Bocks (2005) marking and morphing account of agreement production, this finding is explained by how number features from the syntax and the lexicon are reconciled. This study asks: (1) Can this account of differences in agreement production as a function of morphological richness be extended to the case of bilinguals? (2) Do age of acquisition and/or proficiency modulate whether these differences surface in bilinguals? Agreement production was examined in early and late English–Spanish, and late Spanish–English bilinguals of varying proficiency. Higher-proficiency bilinguals patterned similarly to monolinguals, supporting the extension of the marking and morphing account.

The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers

This study examined whether type of early language experience provides advantages to heritage speakers over second language (L2) learners with morphology, and investigated knowledge of gender agreement and its interaction with diminutive formation. Diminutives are a hallmark of Child Directed Speech in early language development and a highly productive morphological mechanism that facilitates the acquisition of declensional noun endings in many languages (Savickienė and Dressler, 2007). In Spanish, diminutives regularize gender marking in nouns with a non-canonical ending. Twenty-four Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers and 37 L2 learners with intermediate to advanced proficiency completed two picture-naming tasks and an elicited production task. Results showed that the heritage speakers were more accurate than the L2 learners with gender agreement in general, and with non-canonical ending nouns in particular. This study confirms that early language experience and the type of input received confer some advantages to heritage speakers over L2 learners with early-acquired aspects of language, especially in oral production.

How gender affects number: cue-based retrieval in agreement production

This study presents a re-analysis of data from Foote and Bock, aimed at determining how cue-based retrieval works in agreement production by focusing on the role of grammatical gender in number agreement. By examining previously collected production data on number agreement in Mexican and Dominican Spanish with both overt subjects (Experiment 1) and null subjects (Experiment 2), we show that errors in number agreement are more likely in both varieties of Spanish when the subject head noun and local noun match in grammatical gender, but only when the subject is pronounced (Experiment 1). We interpret this effect of grammatical gender using models of cue-based retrieval and show how this effect exists in addition to, and not in place of, other mechanisms that affect agreement, such as agreement attraction (via feature percolation) and notional number.

Crosslanguage Lexical Activation: A Test of the Revised Hierarchical and Morphological Decomposition Models in Arabic-English Bilinguals.

This study tested the predictions of the revised hierarchical (RHM) and morphological decomposition (MDM) models with Arabic-English bilinguals. The RHM (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) predicts that the amount of activation of first language translation equivalents is negatively correlated with second language (L2) proficiency. The MDM (Frost, Forster, & Deutsch, 1997) claims that in nonconcatenative languages, including Arabic, activation spreads by morphological identity rather than orthographic similarity. To test these two models, native speakers of Arabic at two levels of English L2 proficiency completed a translation recognition task. In the critical conditions, the Arabic word was not the correct translation of the English word ( shoulder-katif ) but was orthographically related ( shoulder-kahf “cave”), morphologically related but semantically opaque ( shoulder-takaatuf “unity”), or semantically related ( shoulder-raqaba “neck”). Results show more morphological- than orthographic-form interference for all participants, in line with the MDM. Contrary to the RHM, however, both proficiency groups experienced interference in the semantic condition as well as in the form conditions.

The production of gender agreement in native and L2 Spanish: The role of morphophonological form

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present study was to examine the role of morphophonological cues to gender in the production of gender agreement in native speakers and second language learners of Spanish in light of the Marking and Morphing account of agreement (Eberhard et al., 2005). Participants repeated and completed complex subject noun phrases with head nouns that varied in gender and gender-marking transparency. Analyses of accuracy rates along with Marking and Morphing model simulations of the results indicated that, contrary to previous findings, native speakers were not affected by gender-marking transparency. However, based on model simulations, second language (L2) learners were affected by the morphophonological form of the head noun.

Age of Acquisition and Sensitivity to Gender in Spanish Word Recognition

Speakers of gender-agreement languages use gender-marked elements of the noun phrase in spoken-word recognition: A congruent marking on a determiner or adjective facilitates the recognition of a subsequent noun, while an incongruent marking inhibits its recognition. However, while monolinguals and early language learners evidence this gender-marking effect, late learners do not (Guillelmon & Grosjean 2001). The goals of this study were to determine whether early learners who are not dominant in the gender-marking language (Spanish) can use gender cues in spoken-word recognition and whether the ability of both early and late learners to do so is a function of the noun’s gender-marking transparency. Results of a word-repetition task, completed by 32 native Spanish speakers and 64 English-dominant early and late learners of Spanish indicate that both types of learners make use of gender cues during spoken-word recognition, and that gender-marking transparency may influence this process.