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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1442339
This article is part of the Research Topic Acquisition, Processing, and Maintenance of a New Language: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Sequential Bi/Multilingualism View all 8 articles

The morphophonological dimensions of Spanish Gender marking: NP processing in Spanish bilinguals

Provisionally accepted

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The processing literature provides some evidence that heritage Spanish speakers process gender like 11 monolinguals, since gender-marking in definite articles facilitates their lexical access to nouns, albeit 12 these effects may be reduced relative to speakers who learned the language as majority language. 13 However, previous studies rely on slowed-down speech, which leaves open the question of how 14 processing occurs under normal conditions. Using naturalistic speech, our study tests bilingual 15 processing of gender in determiners, and in word-final gender vowels. Participants were 17 adult 16 heritage speakers of Spanish (HSSs) and 21 adult Spanish-speaking immigrants (ASIs). We 17 presented these bilinguals with questions containing either a definite article or an unmarked 18 possessive (¿Dónde está la/mi pala? 'Where is the/my shovel?') in a three-object display. Gaze 19 fixations were recorded during determiner, noun and post speech processing. Nouns were controlled 20 for gender, morphological transparency, gender alternation, and animacy. Individually, heritage 21 speakers tend to fall within the performance range of adult immigrants, but statistical analyses show 22 that ASIs have more fixations to targets for definite articles compared to HSSs . For HSSs the 23 advantage of gender-marking appears later, during noun processing. In contexts where the noun-final 24 vowels were the only cue to lexical selection, HSS had less looks to targets with alternating nouns, 25 and with feminine nouns. When presented with natural speech, despite the great overlap between 26 adult immigrant and heritage speakers, there are quantitative differences in how HSS process gender 27 both for syntactic agreement (gender in articles) and noun morphophonology. 28 Deleted: Some Spanish-speaking heritage speakersSpanish-36 speaker who grew up in a minority-language context mayshow 37 exhibit divergence with grammatical gender.

    Keywords: Spanish gender, Heritage speakers, NP processing, Eye-tracking, bilingual 8 processing, Domain interactions, Vowel centralization, bilingual effects

    Received: 02 Jun 2024; Accepted: 19 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Perez-Leroux, Colantoni, Thomas and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ana T. Perez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

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