This study investigates L2 learners' ability to use morphosyntactic gender as a predictive cue during the processing of Hindi agreement dependencies. Nine L2 learners of low-intermediate proficiency and nine highly proficient multilingual speakers who consider Hindi one of their dominant languages were tested using a speeded picture-selection…

English speakers tend to produce fewer pronouns when a referential competitor has the same gender as the referent than otherwise. Traditionally, this gender congruence effect has been explained in terms of ambiguity avoidance (e.g., Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000; Fukumura, Van Gompel, & Pickering, 2010). However, an…

Three experiments using online-processing measures explored whether native and non-native Spanish-speaking adults use gender-marked articles to identify referents of target nouns more rapidly, as shown previously with 3-year-old children learning Spanish as L1 (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007). In Experiment 1, participants viewed familiar objects…