Exploring grammatical gender acquisition in L2 Spanish: Difficulties and didactic recommendations

Abstract

This chapter compares gender assignment of real Spanish nouns by second language learners (L1 English n=26, L1 Russian n=26) and by native Spanish speakers (n=26). Participants completes an acceptability judgement task with 40 sentences with Spanish determiner phrases wich were grammatical or ungrammatical, with masculine and feminine nouns with transparent or opaque endings. Our resulst show that (1) the L1 Russian group is more sensitive to gender incongruencies than the L1 English group, suggesting that the presence of grammatical gender in the L1 facilitates the perception of gender inconguencies; and that (2) noun morphology facilitates gender acquisition in L2 Spanish, as both groups of participants rated non-matching determiner phrases with transparent noun more accurately than opaque nouns. Based on the results os this study, this work also provides didactic recommendations in order to improve the teaching of grammatical gender for learners of Spanish as a second language (L2).