Dutch students of French in secondary education are known to struggle with the gender features of its third person possessive pronouns, because these pronouns agree syntactically with the head noun (the possessee), whereas the gender of the possessive pronoun in their L1 agrees semantically with the gender of the possessor. In Dutch, the gender of the possessive pronouns zijn ‘his’ and haar ‘her’ refers to the gender of the pronoun’s referent, i.e., the possessor. In French, by contrast, the semantic gender of the possessor does not determine the choice for the grammatically masculine pronoun son ‘his/her’ or the grammatically feminine pronoun sa ‘his/her’. The gender feature in French is instead dependent on and agrees with the grammatical gender of the possessee, i.e., the head noun that the determiner combines with.¹ Hence, the gender of the third person singular possessive pronoun in French is an instantiation of syntactic agreement (Corbett, 1979), while it is not a grammatical property of the possessive pronoun in Dutch – nor in English (Slevc et al., 2007).

With regard to the difference between the gender systems of Dutch and French pronouns, this article addresses two questions. First, we seek to determine whether gender mismatches between the subject and a subsequent possessive pronoun, as in (1), lead to processing difficulties in Dutch.

Both in Dutch and English, sentences like (1) are pragmatically odd in isolation. The possessive pronoun cannot anaphorically refer to the subject because of a gender mismatch, hence (1) raises the question whose piano Caroline bought in London. We expect this to lead to extra processing costs. Piepers and Redl (2018) found that speakers of Dutch consider sentences with such a gender mismatch, for example Judith heeft zijn outfit samengesteld ‘Judith put together his outfit’ significantly less natural than sentences in which the subject’s gender matches with the gender of the possessive pronoun.

The second question addressed in this study is whether the difference in type of agreement between Dutch and French possessive pronouns leads to processing difficulties for Dutch learners of French when there is a gender mismatch between the semantic gender of the subject and the syntactic gender of the possessive pronoun, as in (2).

If this is the case, they might have no or less processing difficulties when reading ungrammatical French sentences with matching biological and grammatical gender, as in (3).

Section 2 presents an overview of relevant literature on L1 and L2 processing of gendered pronouns. Section 3 reports on a self-paced reading experiment that tested the processing of sentences such as (1). If indeed a processing effect of gender mismatches is found in Dutch, we hypothesize that Dutch learners of French may show similar processing difficulties in reading grammatical French sentences such as (2), and less or no difficulties in reading ungrammatical sentences like those in (3), i.e. show a transfer effect from their L1. These predictions are tested in Section 4. Section 5 discusses our findings in light of the previous literature, and Section 6 presents our conclusions.

Gender mismatches have been found to hamper processing of the personal pronouns he and she in L1 English. For instance, Carreiras et al. (1996) conducted a self-paced reading task using experimental items with stereotypically male or female participants (e.g., doctor, nurse) and found a significant slowdown when a later pronoun did not match the stereotypical gender of its antecedent. Nieuwland (2014) conducted an EEG study and found clear effects of pronouns that did not match the gender of the only available antecedent, as in The boy thought that she would win the race. Further, Dong et al. (2015) conducted two self-paced reading experiments with highly proficient Mandarin Chinese learners of English, and found a gender-mismatch effect on the pronoun for sequences like Mark goes to the zoo to watch animals every day after work for a good rest. She considers it the best way to relax and maintain a good mood, but only when the gender of the antecedent subject was enhanced by a gender-consistent picture, in this case, a picture of a man.

As for possessive pronouns, a mismatch between the biological gender of the possessor and the biological gender of the possessee, as in his mother or her father, can also lead to errors in the production of his and her in English. Slevc et al. (2007) found in an experimental study that native speakers of English made more errors in producing the possessive pronoun when there was a mismatch between the genders of the possessor and the possessee within the noun phrase (5.1 % errors like Victor gave her sister a present) than when there was a match between the genders (1.7 % errors like Victoria gave his sister a present). This error rate was independent of the lexical noun used, as long as the gender of the referent was known. Thus, the noun cousin, which can refer to both a female and a male, would lead to the same amount of gender errors as sister when the context had made it clear that cousin referred to a woman. Slevc et al. (2007) conclude that the gender mismatch is only a mismatch in the genders of biological referents in English, and not due to lexical or syntactic properties of the words used.

Possessive pronouns in Romance languages do not have semantic gender reference, but show syntactic gender agreement. Antón-Méndez (2011) found in an error elicitation experiment that Spanish L2 speakers of English made significantly more errors than Dutch speakers when there was a gender mismatch between the genders of the possessor and the possessee within the noun phrase, such as in her father. However, they only found this result for human possessees, not when the head was an inanimate noun that would have a syntactically mismatching gender in Spanish, but not in English. This may suggest that the errors Romance learners of English make in producing the correctly gendered possessive pronoun is not caused by the fact that they have syntactic gender agreement but rather by the lack of semantic agreement in their native language. Supporting evidence for this comes from a study with Mandarin Chinese learners of English, who make similar errors in the production of his or her when there is a gender mismatch between the possessor and the possessee within the noun phrase (Pozzan & Antón-Méndez, 2017), despite the fact that Mandarin Chinese does not have syntactic gender agreement. The reason might be that Mandarin Chinese does not make a distinction between masculine and feminine pronouns in spoken language, which suggests that the increased number of errors in the production of gendered possessive pronouns in English must be the result of the lack of semantic gender agreement in one’s native language.

Native speakers of English (Slevc et al., 2007) as well as learners of English with different native backgrounds (Antón-Méndez, 2011; Pozzan & Antón-Méndez, 2017; see also White et al., 2007) thus make errors when they have to produce the possessive pronouns his or her within a noun phrase that has a mismatch between the semantic genders of the possessor and the possessee. These errors in production are not mirrored in comprehension (Pozzan & Antón-Méndez, 2017). Although Pozzan and Antón-Méndez (2017) found more production errors for Mandarin Chinese learners of English in the case of mismatching genders within the noun phrase, they did not find evidence for processing difficulties in a concomitant comprehension task. The experimental items prompted participants to place an object next to some other object or character (e.g., Give the apple to his little sister) and here the possessive pronouns were correctly interpreted, independently of the gender mismatch between the pronoun and the head noun’s referent, e.g., sister and his.

In a speeded acceptability judgment experiment, Lago et al. (2019) tested whether English and Spanish learners of German differed in their processing of third person possessive pronouns, which in German agree both semantically with the possessor (sein ‘his’ versus ihr ‘her’) and syntactically with the possessee. Whereas possessive pronouns in English (like in Dutch) only semantically agree with the possessor, in Spanish (like in French) they only syntactically agree in gender with the possessee. Participants were asked to judge the acceptability of German sentences with a possessive construction while their reaction times were being recorded. The stimulus sentences were manipulated such that the referent of the possessive pronoun (the possessor) did or did not agree in semantic gender with the subject of the sentence, as illustrated in (4) (Lago et al., 2019, p. 325).

The sentences in (4a) and (4b) are felicitous, because the subject and the possessive pronoun have the same gender and can therefore be interpreted as coreferential. The sentences in (4c) and (4d), by contrast, are pragmatically infelicitous, marked by the sign #, because there is a mismatch between the semantic genders of the subject and the possessive pronoun, which means that the subject and the possessor cannot be coreferential. These sentences thus correspond to the Dutch sentence in (1) above, which implies that a new discourse referent is introduced by the possessive pronoun in (4c) and (4d).

An additional manipulation in Lago et al.’s (2019) experiment is what they call gender match and gender mismatch. This is quite confusing, because ‘felicitous’ and ‘infelicitous’ sentences can also be described as involving a gender match or mismatch. What the authors mean is that the gender of the subject Frau Schmidt ‘Ms Schmidt’ corresponds to the gender of the object Mutter ‘mother’ in the matching sentences (4a) and (4c), while there is a mismatch between the genders of the subject Herr Schmidt ‘Mr Schmidt’ and the object Mutter ‘mother’ in (4b) and (4d). Note that none of the sentences in (4) are ungrammatical, because the grammatical gender of the possessive pronoun agrees with the gender of the head noun mother in all cases.

While the accuracy in judgments was similar across the participant groups, the Spanish participants took longer to respond to the infelicitous sentences in (4c) and (4d) than the English participants, suggesting that Spanish learners of German, whose native language lacks the semantic gender distinction between ihr ‘her’ and sein ‘his’, had more difficulties in judging the acceptability of these sentences than the English learners of German.

Lago et al. (2019, p. 333) did not find a difference between their ‘gender matching’ and ‘gender mismatching’ conditions, and state that “[t]his was unexpected, as previous production studies had found that possessive errors were more frequent when the possessor and possessee noun mismatched in gender”. They had expected Spanish learners to make more errors in judging the acceptability of the ‘mismatching’ sentences in (4b) and (4d) than the English learners. However, their ‘matching’ condition does not in fact pertain to the gender agreement between the possessor and the possessee within the noun phrase, as in the previous studies discussed, but rather to the gender agreement between the subject and the object. Hence, they code the infelicitous sentence in (4c) as a gender match and the infelicitous sentence in (4d) as a gender mismatch, but when considering the gender agreement between the possessor and possessee within the noun phrase, this should be the other way around. A gender mismatch between the male possessor (sein ‘his’) and the female possessee (Mutter ‘mother’) occurs in (4b) and (4c), but not in (4d). Coreferentiality between the subject and the possessor is not possible in the infelicitous sentences (4c) and (4d). Therefore, there is no gender mismatch between the female possessor ihre ‘her’ and the female possessee Mutter ‘mother’ in (4d), but only between the subject Herr Schmidt ‘Mr. Schmidt’ and the object Mutter ‘mother’.

Thus, while Pozzan and Antón-Mendez (2017) did not find processing difficulties for Mandarin Chinese speakers of English in case of a gender mismatch between the possessor and the possessee (e.g., Give the apple to his little sister), Lago et al. (2019) did not in fact test the effect of such a gender mismatch. They instead gauged the impact of a gender mismatch between the subject and the object, for which they did not find evidence. Note that processing difficulties due to such a subject-object gender mismatch were not expected on the basis of previous research.

In a subsequent implicit self-paced reading experiment, Lago et al. (2019) found that Spanish natives were less affected by the infelicitous possessive pronouns in sentences such as (4c) and (4d) than English natives, indicating that not only their production of possessive pronouns in German is affected, but also their reading comprehension (pace Pozzan & Antón-Méndez, 2017). Again, it may just be the lack of semantic gender agreement in their L1 that causes these difficulties for Spanish learners.

Unlike German, Dutch does not have syntactic gender agreement between the possessive pronoun and the head noun. Extrapolating the results of the previous studies on the processing of gender mismatches in pronouns (Carreiras et al., 1996; Dong et al, 2015; Nieuwland, 2014; Slevc et al., 2007) to the present study, we can expect native speakers of Dutch to be hampered by a gender mismatch in Dutch sentences such as (1) above. If so, Dutch learners of French may also experience processing difficulties when reading sentences like (2), in which the syntactic gender of the possessive pronoun does not match the semantic gender of the subject. Versendaal (2013) conducted a self-paced reading study to test this with three groups of Dutch students of French: high school students in their third year, high school students in their sixth year, and first year university students (and additionally a control group of French native speakers). She found a sharp decrease in reading speed between the sixth year high school students and the university students, as well as between the university students and the native speakers. However, for none of the groups a significant difference was found between the reading times of matching sentences, such as Marie a vendu sa maison ‘Marie sold her(F) house’, and mismatching sentences, as in Jean a vendu sa maison ‘Jean sold his(F) house’. Versendaal suggests that Dutch learners do not at all pay attention to the syntactic or semantic gender information when reading a French sentence. She links this to the idea of good enough processing (Ferreira et al., 2002), which submits that L2 learners are only concerned with understanding the sentences, and not with their morphosyntactic characteristics.

However, Versendaal (2013) only tested grammatical French sentences, which makes it impossible to conclude that the Dutch students did not construct a grammatical representation of the French sentences they read. Moreover, she did not check whether Dutch students show an increase in reading times with semantically mismatching sentences in their native language. If they do not show an effect of mismatches in Dutch sentences such as (1) above, we would not expect them to show an effect of mismatches between syntactic and semantic gender agreement in French sentences such as (2). Therefore, following up on Versendaal’s preliminary results, we conducted two self-paced reading experiments among native Dutch students in secondary education, on which we report next.

The hypothesis is investigated whether native speakers of Dutch have longer reading times in processing Dutch sentences such as (1) above, in which there is a mismatch between the semantic genders of the subject and the subsequent possessive pronoun, in comparison to sentences without such a mismatch.

The hypothesis is tested whether Dutch learners of French take longer to read French sentences such as (2) above, and if so, whether the increase in reading times diminishes or disappears when the sentence is ungrammatical, as in (3). Further, we investigate whether the putative effects are dependent on the non-native participants’ experience with the French language.

Dutch natives show an effect of congruency between the gender of the subject and a subsequent possessive pronoun in their L1 (Experiment 1). Structures with such a gender mismatch lead to a slowdown in reading times. This finding is in line with a previous judgment experiment (Piepers & Redl 2018) and with the experimental literature (Carreiras et al., 1996; Dong et al., 2015; Nieuwland, 2014; Lago et al., 2019).

However, the congruency effect found in Experiment 1 is not reflected in the data from Experiment 2, in which we tested the effect of congruency between the semantic gender of the subject and the syntactic gender of the possessive pronoun in French, syntactically (dis)agreeing with the possessee. Our hypothesis was that Dutch learners of French might process the syntactic gender feature as a semantic one. This is not what we found. Unlike Lago et al. (2019), we did not find an effect of an infelicitous gender combination of the subject and the possessive pronoun. The crucial difference between the experiment conducted by Lago et al. (2019) and ours is that their infelicitous sentences in German were indeed infelicitous, like the infelicitous Dutch sentences in our Experiment 1, but the French sentences in our Experiment 2 were sometimes ungrammatical, yet never infelicitous, because the possessive pronoun in French does not have a semantic gender distinction between ‘his’ and ‘her’.

We did not find an effect of ungrammaticality among the Dutch learners either, which is presumably related to their low level of French. The Dutch learners of French in our experiment were high school students who are approximately 14 to 18 years old and only study French for school purposes. As suggested in Versendaal (2013), the absence of processing difficulties due to syntactic grammaticality violations among Dutch learners of French can be explained in terms of good-enough, underspecified, or shallow language processing (Christianson, 2016; Christianson et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2002; Ferreira & Lowder, 2016; Ferreira & Patson, 2007; Sanford & Sturt, 2002). L2 learners have been found to underutilize syntactic information during sentence processing in comparison to native speakers (Keating, 2009). Although L2 learners can achieve native-like processing of syntactic gender agreement violations, as tested in our second experiment, this has only been found with highly proficient advanced or intermediate learners (Keating, 2009; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010; Clahsen & Felser, 2018).

In a self-paced reading experiment with native speakers of Dutch from secondary education (14–18 years old) we measured an increase in reading times in case of a semantic gender mismatch between the subject of a sentence and a subsequent possessive pronoun in Dutch. We hypothesized that a similar effect would be present for Dutch high school students of French in case of a perceived mismatch between the semantic gender of the subject and the syntactic (unrelated) gender of the possessive pronoun in French. However, we did not find such an effect nor did we find an effect of ungrammaticality, which can be explained by the beginning learners’ level of French, leading to shallow language processing.

We would like to thank Marjolein Klaassen for her help collecting the data and Marine Vuillermet for her help finding native French participants. We are also grateful to the staff and students of the schools that participated in the experiments: Stedelijk College Eindhoven, Jacob-Roelandslyceum in Boxtel, and Carmelcollege in Emmen.