A Study On The Acquisition Of Noun-adjective’s Gender And Number Agreement In The Spoken Spanish By Chinese Beginning Spanish Learners

Grammatical gender is an inherent lexical feature of Spanish nouns,which can be divided into masculine and feminine.Spanish nouns also have number as another linguistic feature and can be divided into singular and plural.In Spanish,there should be gender and number agreement between adjectives and the nouns they modify,and such agreement is a difficult point for Spanish L2 learners.Nowadays,the morphological variability of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in Spanish L2 learners’ interlanguage has attracted great research interestMuch previous research aims to test or generate theoretical hypotheses about language acquisition.On the topic of whether L2 learners whose mother tongue has no grammatical gender can acquire this linguistic feature,some researchers support the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis and maintain that such Spanish L2 learners cannot fully command grammatical gender.Some other researchers,however,hold that Spanish L2 learners whose native language has no grammatical gender can acquire such a grammatical feature.In their opinion,the variations of gender agreement made by these learners do not show their deficit in the command of functions of gender agreement,but rather their difficulties in dealing with operations on the morphosyntactic level.These researchers support the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis.Besides,in the comparative studies of gender and number processing,some researchers find that gender processing takes up more cognitive resources than number processing.Then they put forward the view of asymmetries in gender and number agreement processing.Moreover,according to the Morphological Underspecification Hypothesis,L2 learners may use masculine forms in feminine context or use singular forms in plural context,thus making the error of underspecification,or they may use feminine forms in masculine context or use plural forms in singular context,thus making the error of feature clash.Through studying the use of gender and number of Spanish L2 learners,some researchers intend to test this hypothesis and predict that the default forms for L2 learners are underspecified forms,that is,learners tend to make errors of underspecification while avoiding errors of feature clash.Furthermore,some other researchers try to corroborate the Syntactic Distance Principle and the Shallow Structure Hypothesis by analyzing the effects of the syntactic distance between nouns and adjectives on gender and number agreement processing.The Syntactic Distance Principle asserts that the greater the number of the syntactic nodes that separate a controller from its target,the harder it will be to do syntactic computations.The Shallow Structure Hypothesis asserts that L2 learners compute less detailed syntactic representations than native speakers during sentence comprehension and that nativelike processing of morphosyntactic features is restricted to local domains,where "local" is defined as "between closely adjacent constituents."In brief,further research is called for because these studies either reach no consensus or remain short of adequate research evidenceSome previous empirical studies aim to reveal the factors that may influence the acquisition of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement by Spanish L2 learners,but these studies may be limited in the type of the subjects’ mother tongue,research framework and analytical factors.Therefore,further research is needed to explore the factors that may influence the acquisition of such agreement by Spanish L2 learners.Based on Chinese beginning learners’ spoken Spanish,the present study was designed to investigate the variations of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement made by these learners,in an attempt to respond to the following three research questions:1.What are the characteristics of the linguistic variable "noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement" in Chinese beginning learners’ spoken Spanish?2.How do the five factors related to the noun’s or adjective’s properties,that is,the animacy of the noun(animate/inanimate),the morphology of the noun(overt/non-overt),the gender of the noun(masculine/feminine),the number of the noun(singular/plural)and the type of the adjective(determinative/qualitative),influence the accuracy of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in the speech of Chinese beginning Spanish learners?3.How do the three syntactic factors,that is,the adjective’s grammatical function in the noun-adjective collocation(attributive/predicative),the position of the attributive adjective in the noun phrase(pre-/post-nominal),the tense of the sentence where the noun-adjective collocation is located(present/past/future),as well as the variable of discourse type(dialogue/narrative/descriptive/explicative and argumentative),influence the accuracy of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in the speech of Chinese beginning Spanish learners?Both quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted in the present research The quantitative study employed 12 sophomores from the Department of Spanish of Nanjing University as subjects.Interviews with these students resulted in a spoken Spanish corpus,from which 1,080 tokens were analyzed:a descriptive statistics analysis was adopted in exploring the characteristics of the linguistic variable"noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement" and an inferential statistics analysis was adopted in exploring the effects of the above-mentioned nine factors.The qualitative study’s subjects were 14 sophomores from the Department of Spanish,Nanjing University.On the topic of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in their spoken Spanish,each of them was given an interview comprising questions about the nine factors.Then a qualitative analysis was made on their answers.The research findings were as follows1.Chinese beginning Spanish learners can acquire the abstract linguistic feature of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement,which is absent in their native language’s grammar.For them,the processing of gender agreement is more difficult than the processing of number agreement.The learners make errors of underspecification more often than those of feature clash.The masculine and the singular are their default forms and the default tendency of the masculine is stronger than that of the singular.Meanwhile,however,they can monitor the errors of underspecification by showing a counter-default tendency,which is stronger on the gender than on the number.In general,errors of feature clash are fewer in number than errors of underspecification,but there is no great disparity between them.To some extent,Chinese beginning Spanish learners also have a tendency to use feminine forms in masculine context.They can also monitor errors of feature clash,but it is weaker than the monitoring of errors of underspecification.2.Among the factors related to the noun’s or adjective’s properties,the gender of the noun and the type of the adjective have significant effects on the accuracy of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in Chinese beginning learners’spoken Spanish.Learners are more accurate with masculine than with feminine nouns,and more accurate with determinative than with qualitative adjectives.However,the other factors such as the animacy of the noun,the morphology of the noun and the number of the noun have no significant effects on the accuracy of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in these beginning learners’ spoken Spanish3.As to the three syntactic factors and the variable of discourse type,the adjective’s grammatical function in the noun-adjective collocation has significant effects on the accuracy of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in Chinese beginning learners’ spoken Spanish.Learners are significantly more accurate with attributive than with predicative adjectives.Nonetheless,the position of the attributive adjective in the noun phrase,the tense of the sentence where the noun-adjective collocation is located,and the variable of discourse type have no significant effects on the accuracy of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in Chinese beginning learners’ spoken SpanishThe theoretical significance of the present research is as follows:1.Chinese beginning Spanish learners can acquire the linguistic feature of noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement,which is absent in their mother tongue’s grammar.That is to say,Chinese beginning Spanish learners can command grammatical gender on the abstract functional category.This result supports the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis but collides with the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis.2.For Chinese beginning Spanish learners,the processing of gender agreement is harder than the processing of number agreement.This finding suggests that the former costs more cognitive resources than the latter,and it gives support to the view of asymmetries in gender and number agreement processing.3.The default forms for Chinese beginning Spanish learners are underspecified forms,namely unmarked forms.They commit errors of underspecification more often than they do errors of feature clash,but in the meantime,they devote their effort to avoiding such errors,and the effort is even greater than that is devoted in the avoidance of errors of feature clash.This finding partially supports the Morphological Underspecification Hypothesis.4.For Chinese beginning Spanish learners,the use of attributive adjectives is significantly more accurate than that of predicative adjectives.This finding conforms to the Syntactic Distance Hypothesis and the Shallow Structure Hypothesis.Besides,this study has pedagogical significance in that it contributes to the teaching of Spanish noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in China.The analysis of the characteristics of the morphological variations in noun-adjective’s gender and number agreement in Chinese beginning learners’spoken Spanish,as well as the discussion of the influencing factors of their acquisition of such agreement,could offer reference for both Spanish teachers and authors of related textbooks and teaching aid materials.