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Whose? L2-English speakers' possessive pronoun gender errors*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2010

INÉS ANTÓN-MÉNDEZ
INÉS ANTÓN-MÉNDEZ*
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, The Netherlands & University of New England, Australia
*
Address for correspondence: Psychology, SBCSS, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australiaiantonme@une.edu.au
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Abstract

This article reports the results of an experiment on production of his/her in English as a second language (L2) by proficient native speakers of Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. In Dutch and English, 3rd person singular possessive pronouns agree in gender with their antecedents, in Italian and Spanish possessives in general agree with the noun they accompany (possessum). However, while in Italian the 3rd person singular possessives overtly agree in gender with the possessums, in Spanish they lack overt morphological gender marking. Dutch speakers were found to make very few possessive gender errors in any condition, Spanish and Italian speakers, on the other hand, behaved like Dutch speakers when the possessum was inanimate, but made more errors when it was animate (e.g., his mother). Thus, even proficient L2 speakers are susceptible to the influence of automatic processes that should apply in their first language alone. The pattern of results has implications for pronoun production and models of bilingual language production.

Keywords

bilingualismpossessive pronounssecond language speakersgender errors
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 318 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

This research was funded by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to the author (VENI 275–70-019). I would like to thank my participants for their generosity with their time, my Italian informants, Anna Cavallaro, Franko Leoni, Ivano Caponigro, and Giuli Dussias for their valuable help with the preparation of the stimuli, and my research assistants, Jasmijn Claij and Mee Wun Lee, for their great work transcribing the recordings.

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