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Misbehaved masculines: Incidental acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 German during reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2017

DENISA BORDAG ,
AMIT KIRSCHENBAUM ,
MARIA ROGAHN ,
ANDREAS OPITZ  and
ERWIN TSCHIRNER
DENISA BORDAG*
Affiliation:
University of Leipzig
AMIT KIRSCHENBAUM
Affiliation:
University of Leipzig
MARIA ROGAHN
Affiliation:
University of Leipzig
ANDREAS OPITZ
Affiliation:
University of Leipzig
ERWIN TSCHIRNER
Affiliation:
University of Leipzig
*
Address for correspondence: Denisa Bordag, Herder-Institut, University of Leipzig, Beethovenstr. 15, 04107 Leipzig, Germany. denisav@uni-leipzig.de
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Abstract

The present study explores the early stages of incidental acquisition of grammatical gender during reading in German as a second language (L2) using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results show that advanced L2 learners are sensitive to gender agreement violations after as few as three to four exposures to a novel noun within a short text. The results also indicate that the acquisition of grammatical gender from syntactic context is gender dependent: Whereas gender violation effects were observed for feminine and neuter nouns, no such effects were observed for masculine nouns.

Keywords

incidental vocabulary acquisitionL2grammatical genderself-paced reading
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 130 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Thomas Pechmann for his valuable comments, as well as Tabea Verma and Marcel Fuchs for running the experiments. The research was part of a project grant provided to Denisa Bordag (BO-3615/2-1) and its follow-up grant (BO-3615/2-3) by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Council)).

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