REVISITING SPANISH GRAMMATICAL GENDER IN MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL SPEAKERS: EVIDENCE FROM EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS AND EYE-MOVEMENTS
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Beatty-Martinez, Anne Lauren
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 29, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Paola Eulalia Dussias, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Paola Eulalia Dussias, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Matthew Thomas Carlson, Committee Member
John Lipski, Committee Member
Judith F. Kroll, Outside Member
M. Teresa Bajo, Special Member - Keywords:
- Spanish
Bilingualism
Codeswitching
Grammatical Gender
language processing
psycholinguistics - Abstract:
- In this dissertation, three experiments were conducted examining distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine grammatical gender in Spanish, the resulting biases in gender assignment, and the consequences of these assignment strategies on the processing of grammatical gender in monolingual and bilingual speakers. Experiment 1 examined electrophysiological responses to masculine and feminine grammatical gender violations in monolingual Spanish speakers. Consistent with previous findings, congruency effects showed the classical LAN-P600 biphasic pattern when collapsed across gender. Notwithstanding, splitting the data by noun gender evoked different event-related potentials for the two genders. Responses to masculine grammatical gender violations had far greater variability and showed a reduced P600 effect. In contrast, feminine gender violations elicited a more robust P600 response that was modulated by lexical knowledge: individuals with greater language experience were more sensitive to grammatical gender violations with feminine nouns. Taken together, the Experiment 1 results provide support for a differential representation between masculine and feminine gender by demonstrating that variability in gender processing exists even among monolinguals processing in their native language. Experiment 2 used the visual world paradigm to examine whether highly balanced Spanish-English bilinguals from Puerto Rico were able to exploit grammatical gender cues on determiners to facilitate spoken word processing. Based on previous findings, it was hypothesized that bilinguals’ choice to use both languages freely and interchangeably would modulate grammatical gender anticipatory effects. A second aim of this experiment was to examine to what extent gender cues may differentially shape bilinguals’ expectations regarding the likelihood of codeswitching. To this end, unilingual and codeswitched noun phrases embedded in Spanish carrier phrases were compared in conditions where gender cues encoded in determiners could be used informatively or not. The results indicated that bilinguals were able to exploit gender cues predictively, regardless of determiner gender or target noun language. With regard to the second objective, there was a processing cost associated with codeswitching indicated by the presence of significantly lower looks towards target items following noun onset. However, the magnitude of this effect relied on the gender of the determiner preceding the codeswitch: processing costs were greater for codeswitches preceded by feminine determiners likely due to their highly infrequent status in codeswitched speech. This result was interpreted as evidence that bilinguals are able to exploit masculine gender as a cue to an upcoming codeswitch during comprehension. Experiment 3 sought to determine the extent to which exposure to inconsistent gender assignment affected predictive use of gender cues. To measure adaptation effects for the two genders separately, participants from Experiment 2 were split into two groups. One group of participants was exposed to incongruent NPs with masculine determiners; the other was exposed to incongruent NPs with feminine determiners. Two analyses were conducted. The first analysis tested whether exposure to inconsistent input modulated the gender anticipatory effect observed in Experiment 2. The results showed that bilinguals in both groups continued to use grammatical gender to anticipate the target noun despite having been exposed to inconsistent gender cues. The second analysis compared the proportion of looks towards target items as a function of determiner gender. For both groups, the proportion of looks towards target items was significantly higher in conditions with 100% determiner gender consistency. Overall, the results provide converging evidence of the representation difference between masculine and feminine grammatical gender in Spanish. The results indicate that individuals are highly sensitive to distributional variation in their experience, and further suggest that this linguistic tuning may hold important consequences for the language system more generally. Implications of the findings for the design of future codeswitching and gender processing studies and, more broadly, for understanding the role of variation for language processing and language control are discussed.