Why wait? Psycholinguistic investigations of the roles of learning condition and gender stability in L2 gender-based anticipation

It is well documented that grammatical gender poses a pervasive problem for adult second language learners. Whereas native speakers can use prenominal grammatical gender marking to anticipate upcoming nouns in sentences, L2 learners often show a reduced or absent ability to use gender in this manner (Grüter, Lew-Williams, & Fernald, 2012; Hopp, 2013, 2016). The Lexical Gender Learning Hypothesis (LGLH) proposes a chain of causality to account for this finding: 1) Differences in the conditions under which children and adults learn a language lead to weaker links between nouns and their gender representations for adult L2 learners; 2) These weaker links lead to greater variability in gender assignment; 3) This increased variability in gender assignment reduces the extent to which adult L2 learners use gender predictively. Across three experiments, this dissertation provides the first direct test of the LGLH. Results do not find evidence for the claim that learning context affects the stability of gender assignments nor the ability to use gender as an anticipatory cue. The data do, however, support the hypothesis that gender assignment variability modulates the anticipatory use of gender marking. These findings indicate that L2 knowledge plays an important role in online L2 processing, and that failure to adequately account for this knowledge may lead to an underestimation of L2 performance

Talking out of order: task order and retrieval of grammatical gender and phonology in lexical access

<p>Despite early evidence that grammatical gender is retrieved prior to phonology in lexical access, more recent studies demonstrating task effects and non-converging evidence raise doubts about the extent to which this is a general feature of the language production system. We employed the dual-choice go/no-go paradigm with event-related potentials (ERPs) in order to further clarify the time course of retrieval of grammatical gender and phonology. Specifically, we examined how task order influences the relative timing with which these features are retrieved. Results find no clear evidence that grammatical gender is retrieved prior to phonology in a serial manner. Instead, the relative timing with which these features are retrieved is subject to task order, suggesting that prior estimates of lexical access obtained with this paradigm may be confounded by task effects. Overall, our result support parallel access models of feature retrieval during lexical access and suggest that attentional biases may modulate retrieval.</p

Quasi-Separation in Linguistic Data

Code, data and summary tables for paper examining quasi-separation in different kinds of linguistic data