Gender And Number Agreements Processing During Pronoun Resolution Among Chinese Intermediate Spanish Learners

Over the past decades,gender and number agreements processing in local phrases and long-distance anaphoric relations has been a major concern in the field of psycholinguistics.Studies concerning gender and number agreements processing in L2/L3 have found native-like processing of these features by learners,which was also influenced by crosslinguistic factors.Nevertheless,most studies probed into merely syntactically-based or semantically-based gender and number agreement.However,studies on gender and number agreements from both semantic and syntactic perspectives are rare.Therefore,the current study investigated the processing of both semantically-based gender and number and syntactically-based grammatical gender agreements during pronoun resolution among Chinese intermediate Spanish learners for the first time.The experiment consisted of an online self-paced reading task and an offline grammaticality judgement task.Participants read Spanish anaphoric sentences with animate/inanimate antecedents and identified the antecedent for the pronoun in the online task.They were required to judge the grammaticality of the same sentences and circle the grammatical errors in the offline task.Analyses of the reaction times and the judgement accuracy found that participants showed sensitivity to both semantic gender mismatches,notional number mismatches and grammatical gender mismatches;semantic gender mismatches were detected earlier than notional number mismatches;participants still manifested sensitivity to semantic gender mismatches rather than grammatical gender mismatches after reading the sentence;animate antecedents were identified more quickly than inanimate antecedents when no disagreement occurredThe results indicate that 1)Chinese intermediate Spanish learners can acquire native-like processing of L3 grammar;2)Spanish semantic gender,notional number,and grammatical gender features are processed differently;3)the pronoun in anaphoric relations is resolved stage by stage.This study supports the learnability of L3 uninterpretable grammar and the feature hierarchy.Moreover,it helps refine the pronoun resolution model...