Gender assignment errors in adult L2 Spanish: incorrect assignment or unavailable assignment?

Abstract Recent research suggests that second language learners’ difficulty with gender marking is largely a lexical problem (e.g., Alarcón. 2011. Spanish gender agreement under complete and incomplete acquisition: Early and late bilinguals’ linguistic behavior within the noun phrase. Bilingualism 14(3). 332–350; Grüter et al. 2012. Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research 28(2). 191–215; Hopp. 2013. Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability. Second Language Research 29(1). 33–56, 2016 Learning (not) to predict: Grammatical gender processing in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 32(2). 277–307). However, relatively little research has addressed whether lexical gender errors are due to nouns being assigned inaccurate gender or due to gender assignment being unavailable because the assignment is absent, weak, or inaccessible. A related question is whether the type of assignment error might depend on the morphophonological cues on the noun. In this preliminary study, adult second language learners of Spanish produce noun phrases in three conditions, using the same nouns each time. They also label noun gender on a paper-and-pencil task. Results show that learners used mixed genders with nouns, rather than a stable but incorrect gender, except with feminine opaque nouns. Additionally, the gender labels that learners provided on the paper-and-pencil task did not always correspond to their actual gender use; rather, learners often used mixed genders with nouns even when they labeled them correctly. Together, these results suggest that assignment errors are not likely due to incorrect gender assignment, although morphophonological properties of the noun play a role.