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Poster C45, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall

How do phonological competitors affect gender processing in heritage Spanish speakers?

Alisa Baron1;1The University of Rhode Island

Spanish has a rich system of inflectional morphology in relation to English. Articles are especially important because they precede nouns in most contexts, are required to maintain grammaticality of a sentence, and are therefore used with a high frequency in all aspects of language. Grammatical gender is an important morphosyntactic cue to identify words and build syntactic representations in real time (i.e. Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2011; Hopp, 2013; Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004). Prior gender information provided by an article can reduce the search space in the lexicon to only those elements with a particular gender (Friederici & Jacobsen, 1999). Thus, gender cues help listeners keep track of the references in a sentence (Bates et al., 1996) and facilitate the interpretation of speech. To understand what heritage Spanish speakers attend to during comprehension of gendered articles, 36 heritage Spanish speakers participated in a visual world paradigm. Three groups of experimental stimuli were prepared; one group with informative (different-gender) articles, one group with uninformative (same-gender) articles, and one group with incorrect (ungrammatical) articles. A target noun was preceded by the correct (or incorrect) gendered article surrounded by a phonological competitor and two distractors with the same or different gendered articles. The Bilingual Input Output Survey was administered to all participants in order to calculate current language use. Like their monolingual Spanish-speaking peers, as a group, heritage Spanish speakers in this experiment showed sensitivity to gender. There were earlier fixations to the target in the informative trials than the uninformative trials and uninformative trial fixations were earlier than the ungrammatical trials. To evaluate the hypothesis that gender-sensitivity variability may be due to language experience, looks to the phonological competitors were analyzed. In regard to the phonological competitor within the informative trials, adults with more current Spanish use did not look at the phonological competitor more than the other distractors while the adults with less current Spanish use did so. All participants fixated on the phonological competitor within the uninformative trials more than the other distractors. All participants were slower on the ungrammatical trials and spent more time looking at the phonological competitor as it was the most viable option with the same article and initial consonant and vowel as the auditory stimulus. As the rest of the target noun unfolded auditorily, the target noun needed to re-enter the competitor set. In turn, participants were significantly slower in settling on the target noun as the correct response as it may have already been discarded from the competitor set earlier. Thus, current Spanish use appears to mediate if a phonological competitor enters or exists the competitor set during gender processing.

Themes: Multilingualism, Syntax
Method: Eye Tracking

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