THE SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH GENDER AGREEMENT: THE EFFECTS OF LINGUISTIC VARIABLES ON ACCURACY.Irma Alarcón. Munich: Lincom Europa, 2006. Pp. vi + 130. $52.00 paper.

This volume, a published dissertation, presents an empirical investigation into Spanish gender agreement among second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is English. Although the acquisition of grammatical gender has recently been the focus of many studies within the generative paradigm (cf. White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska-Macgregor, & Leung, 2004), Alarcón adopts a psycholinguistic approach to determine how certain linguistic variables contribute to learners' accuracy in this area of grammatical processing. In order to limit the scope of investigation, the author focuses on gender agreement between subject nouns and predicate adjectives.