Does the ending matter? Revisiting the acquisition of L2 Spanish grammatical gender by gendered and ungendered L1 adults

Abstract

The acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender has been widely investigated in the L2 and 2L1 literatures. Previous studies have focused on identifying the difficulties L2 speakers encounter and on whether they attain a native-like performance. This has been widely researched with ungendered L1 speakers (mainly English) and with gendered languages such as Russian or German. This chapter aims at reviewing the most relevant works recently published on the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Spanish by setting the focus on the role played by the gender transparency of the noun and how the latter influences the speaker’s acquisition depending on the presence or absence of gender in their L1.