Gender Assignment and Agreement in L2 Spanish: Evidence from a Medium-Scale Learner Corpus

Maura Cruz Enríquez; François Pichette

doi:10.7557/1.14.3.8133

Authors

Maura Cruz Enríquez Université TÉLUQ https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8151-7383
François Pichette Université TÉLUQ https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6203-050X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/1.14.3.8133

Keywords:

gender assignment, gender agreement, L2 Spanish, medium-size corpus analyses, Usage-Based approaches to SLA

Abstract

This study investigates gender assignment and agreement accuracy in the written productions of French-speaking learners of Spanish across three proficiency levels. Drawing on a medium-scale learner corpus, we coded all noun phrases for gender assignment (based on determiner inflection), for noun-adjective agreement, and for determiner-adjective agreement, and we examined the impact of various linguistic and learner-related predictors using Bayesian mixed-effects models. Although the overall error rate was relatively low, likely due to task type and familiar vocabulary, the models revealed robust effects of proficiency level and of underlying grammatical and lexical factors. Regarding gender assignment, accuracy was significantly lower for nouns with non-prototypical or ambiguous gender markers, for feminine nouns, and when Spanish and French differed in grammatical gender. Moreover, lower accuracy was observed with certain types of determiners. Noun-adjective agreement was influenced by the same factors, except for non-prototypical gender markings, which did not have a significant effect. In addition, less accuracy was observed with prenominal adjectives. Determiner–adjective agreement, in turn, only showed lower accuracy with feminine nouns, but the results of the statistical model should be interpreted with caution, due to high Pareto k values. Nevertheless, descriptive data confirm the relevance of distinguishing between noun–adjective and determiner–adjective agreement and highlight the need for larger corpora with a greater number of errors to model this phenomenon more conclusively. Overall, these findings contribute to a better understanding of gender processing in L2, demonstrate the value of medium-sized corpus analysis in second language acquisition research, and lay the groundwork for future research exploring crosslinguistic combinations beyond Spanish and French.

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