Abstract
Inflectional morphology causes persistent difficulties for second language (L2) learners (Montrul, Silvina & Kim Potowski. 2007. Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 11(3). 301–328; Montrul, Silvina, Israel de la Fuente, Justin Davidson & Rebecca Foote. 2013. The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers. Second Language Research 29(1). 87–118). Learners operate with a default gender value, and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners and modifiers (White, Lydia, Elena Valenzuela, Martyna Kozlowska-Macgregor & Ingrid Leung. 2004. Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 25(1). 105–133; Schlig 2003). 111 essays written were collected containing 799 correct uses and 281 errors from Dutch students whose written ability in Spanish is A2 (Common European Framework). The results show that singular masculine nominal agreement marking at the determiner is significantly better produced by Dutch L2 learners of Spanish than when the marking of nominal agreement is plural, feminine or at the adjective. This study corroborates the previous results where learners operate with a default gender value and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners. Also these results show that L2 learners of Spanish are significantly less accurate in gender agreement with adjectives than with determiners.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Speech-accompanying gestures in L1 and L2 conversational interaction by speakers of different proficiency levels
- Transfer in L3 cognate language acquisition: The role of language background on instructed L3 Portuguese acquisition
- Task complexity, language proficiency and working memory: Interaction effects on second language speech performance
- Typology and contexts of article errors: Investigation into the use of English articles by Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners
- Gender assignment strategies used by L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish
- The refusal of request speech act in Persian, English, and Balouchi languages: A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study
- Non-nativelike outcome of naturalistic child L2 acquisition of Japanese: The case of noun–verb collocations
- Effects of mixed instruction on Chinese EFL learners’ perception of phonemic contrasts
- Dynamism of collocation in L2 English writing: A bigram-based study
- Nominal agreement in the interlanguage of Dutch L2 learners of Spanish
- Picture or non-picture? The influence of narrative task types on lower- and higher-proficiency EFL learners’ oral production
- Grammatical aspect and world knowledge in second language reading
- An exploratory study on pro-drop in a written description task in L2 Spanish
- Negotiation of meaning in child-child vs. adult-adult interactions: Evidence from low proficiency EFL learners
- Aspect semantics and ESL article use
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Speech-accompanying gestures in L1 and L2 conversational interaction by speakers of different proficiency levels
- Transfer in L3 cognate language acquisition: The role of language background on instructed L3 Portuguese acquisition
- Task complexity, language proficiency and working memory: Interaction effects on second language speech performance
- Typology and contexts of article errors: Investigation into the use of English articles by Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners
- Gender assignment strategies used by L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish
- The refusal of request speech act in Persian, English, and Balouchi languages: A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study
- Non-nativelike outcome of naturalistic child L2 acquisition of Japanese: The case of noun–verb collocations
- Effects of mixed instruction on Chinese EFL learners’ perception of phonemic contrasts
- Dynamism of collocation in L2 English writing: A bigram-based study
- Nominal agreement in the interlanguage of Dutch L2 learners of Spanish
- Picture or non-picture? The influence of narrative task types on lower- and higher-proficiency EFL learners’ oral production
- Grammatical aspect and world knowledge in second language reading
- An exploratory study on pro-drop in a written description task in L2 Spanish
- Negotiation of meaning in child-child vs. adult-adult interactions: Evidence from low proficiency EFL learners
- Aspect semantics and ESL article use