Processing mismatching gendered possessive pronouns in L1 Dutch and L2 French

Author(s)

  • Gert-Jan Schoenmakers Radboud University
  • Theresa Redl Radboud University
  • Sebastian Collin Radboud University
  • Rozanne Versendaal Utrecht University
  • Peter de Swart Radboud University
  • Helen de Hoop Radboud University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51751/dujal9948

Keywords:

self-paced reading, gender features, syntactic agreement, semantic agreement, shallow processing

Abstract

The results of a self-paced reading experiment show that reading times in Dutch increase when there is a gender mismatch between the subject and a subsequent possessive pronoun, signaling an increase in processing difficulty. We hypothesized that Dutch learners of French incorrectly apply the rules of their L1 in their L2 and should therefore also show an increase in reading times in French upon encountering a possessive pronoun for which grammatical gender differs from the biological gender of the subject (the possessor). At the same time, we expected that they would have no or less difficulties in processing ungrammatical French sentences in which the biological gender of the subject/possessor matches the gender of the possessive pronoun. We did not find either of these effects in a second self-paced reading experiment. We assume that the Dutch learners of French parse the foreign language sentences in a shallow fashion.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Antón-Méndez, I. (2011). Whose? L2-English speakers’ possessive pronoun gender errors. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(3), 318–331. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728910000325

Baayen, R. H., & Milin, P. (2010). Analyzing reaction times. International Journal of Psychological Research, 3(2), 12–28. https://doi.org/10.21500/20112084.807

Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3), 255–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001

Bates, D., Kliegl, R., Vasishth, S., & Baayen, R. H. (2015). Parsimonious mixed models. ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:1506.04967, 1–27. https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04967

Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01

Christianson, K. (2016). When language comprehension goes wrong for the right reasons: Good-enough, underspecified, or shallow language processing. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(5), 817–828. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1134603

Carreiras, M., Garnham, A., Oakhill, J., & Cain, K. (1996). The use of stereotypical gender information in constructing a mental model: Evidence from English and Spanish. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psycholinguistics, 49(3), 639–663. https://doi.org/10.1080/713755647

Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J. F., & Ferreira, F. (2001). Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42(4), 368–407. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2001.0752

Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2018). Some notes on the shallow structure hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3), 693-706. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263117000250

Corbett, G. G. (1979). The agreement hierarchy. Journal of Linguistics, 15(2), 203–224. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700016352

Dong, Y., Wen, Y., Zeng, X., & Ji, Y. (2015). Exploring the cause of English pronoun gender errors by Chinese learners of English: Evidence from the self-paced reading paradigm. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44(6), 733–747. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-014-9314-6

Ferreira, F., Bailey, K. G. D., & Ferraro, V. (2002). Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(1), 11–15. https://doi.org/10.1111%2F1467-8721.00158

Ferreira, F., & Lowder, M. W. (2016). Prediction, information structure, and good-enough language processing. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 65, 217–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.plm.2016.04.002

Ferreira, F., & Patson, N. D. (2007) The ‘Good Enough’ approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(1-2), 71–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00007.x

Keating, G. D. (2009). Sensitivity to violations of gender agreement in native and nonnative Spanish: An eye-movement investigation. Language Learning, 59(3), 503–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00516.x

Kliegl, R., Masson, M. E. J., & Richter, E. M. (2010). A linear mixed model analysis of masked repetition priming. Visual Cognition, 18(5), 655–681. http://doi.org/10.1080/13506280902986058

Lago, S., Stutter Garcia, A., & Felser, C. (2019). The role of native and non-native grammars in the comprehension of possessive pronouns. Second Language Research, 35(3), 319–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658318770491

Mitchell, D. C. (1984). An evaluation of subject-paced reading tasks and other methods of investigating immediate processes in reading. In D. E. Kieras, & M. A. Just (Eds.), New methods in reading comprehension research (pp. 69–89). Erlbaum.

Nieuwland, M. S. (2014). “Who’s he?” Event-related brain potentials and unbound pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language, 76, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.002

Piepers, J., & Redl, T. (2018). Gender-mismatching pronouns in context. In B. LeBruyn, & J. Berns (Eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 35 (pp. 97–110). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00007.pie

Pozzan, L., & Antón-Méndez, I. (2017). English possessive gender agreement in production and comprehension: Similarities and differences between young monolingual English learners and adult Mandarin–English second language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(4), 985–1017. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716417000017

R Core Team. (2018) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R foundation for statistical computing. https://www.r-project.org/

Sagarra, N., & Herschensohn, J. (2010). The role of proficiency and working memory in gender and number agreement processing in L1 and L2 Spanish. Lingua, 120(8), 2022-2039. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.02.004

Sanford, A. J., & Sturt, P. (2002). Depth of processing in language comprehension: not noticing the evidence. Trends in Cognitive Science, 6(9), 382–386. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(02)01958-7

Slevc, L. R., Wardlow Lane, L., & Ferreira, V. S. (2007). Pronoun production: Word or world knowledge? MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 53, 191–203.

Versendaal, R. (2013) Onderzoeksrapport Honours-onderzoek: Een onderzoek naar de verwerking van het bezittelijk voornaamwoord door Nederlandse leerders van het Frans [Research report Honours-study: An investigation of the processing of the possessive pronoun by Dutch learners of French]. Unpublished manuscript, Radboud University Nijmegen.

White, J., Muñoz, C., & Collins, L. (2007). The his/her challenge: Making progress in a ‘regular’ L2 programme. Language Awareness, 16(4), 278–299. https://doi.org/10.2167/la419.0

Published

14-07-2022

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Schoenmakers, G.-J., Redl, T., Collin, S., Versendaal, R., de Swart, P., & de Hoop, H. (2022). Processing mismatching gendered possessive pronouns in L1 Dutch and L2 French. Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11. https://doi.org/10.51751/dujal9948