L2 Interpretations of Spanish Masculine Plural Noun Phrases (NPs)
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
In theory, masculine plural noun phrases in Spanish are gender ambiguous, meaning that they can refer to either a group of solely men, or a mixed group of men and women. Recent research, however, has found that, for native speakers of Spanish, the masculine interpretation is actually more accessible to speakers than the mixed interpretation (Anaya-Ramírez et al. 2022). This preference also appears to have an early onset for native speakers (Gygax et al. 2019). The goal of this paper, however, is to determine if the same phenomenon is seen in L2 Spanish speakers. Prior research has shown that L2 Spanish speakers with English as their L1, a language without grammatical gender, have difficulties with processing grammatical gender cues, motivating us to believe that they may exhibit different behaviors when confronted with these ambiguous masculine plural noun phrases in Spanish (Lew-Williams and Fernald 2010). This investigation is conducted by looking at the acceptance rates and reaction times of L2 Spanish speakers when encountering either a feminine or masculine anaphor to refer to a member of a group previously identified with a masculine plural noun phrase. This is the same experimental design utilized by Anaya-Ramírez et al. 2022, but their work was on native Spanish speakers. Results from the experiment found that masculine anaphors, non gender-stereotyped nouns, and increased Spanish proficiency all produced significantly faster reaction speeds for the stimuli in the experiment. The results suggest that L2 speakers are more sensitive to noun- stereotype information when making acceptability judgements. This supports the idea that L2 speakers understand and interpret grammatical gender information in a different way than L1 speakers do.
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Keywords
L2 Acquisition, Spanish, Language learning, linguistics, grammatical gender