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Lexical constraints in second language learning: Evidence on grammatical gender in German*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2014

SUSAN C. BOBB ,
JUDITH F. KROLL  and
CARRIE N. JACKSON
SUSAN C. BOBB*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University
JUDITH F. KROLL
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University
CARRIE N. JACKSON
Affiliation:
Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, The Pennsylvania State University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The present study asked whether or not the apparent insensitivity of second language (L2) learners to grammatical gender violations reflects an inability to use grammatical information during L2 lexical processing. Native German speakers and English speakers with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency in German performed a translation-recognition task. On critical trials, an incorrect translation was presented that either matched or mismatched the grammatical gender of the correct translation. Results show interference for native German speakers in conditions in which the incorrect translation matched the gender of the correct translation. Native English speakers, regardless of German proficiency, were insensitive to the gender mismatch. In contrast, these same participants were correctly able to assign gender to critical items. These findings suggest a dissociation between explicit knowledge and the ability to use that information under speeded processing conditions and demonstrate the difficulty of L2 gender processing at the lexical level.

Keywords

grammatical gendersecond language acquisitionproficiency
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 502 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported in part by NSF BCS-0720155 to Susan C. Bobb and Judith F. Kroll. The writing of this article was also supported in part by NIH Grant HD053146 and NSF Grants BCS-0955090 and OISE-0968369 to Judith F. Kroll, NIH Grant HD058765 to Carrie N. Jackson, and the German Excellence Initiative to Susan C. Bobb. We thank the audiences of the 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism and Psychonomics 2008 as well as Victor Kuperman, Natasha Tokowicz, Theres Grüter, Amber MacMillan, Sarah Chabal, and Jared Linck. We would also like to thank Angélique Blackburn, Mark Connelly, and Shara Gress for assistance with data collection.

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