| The main purpose of this dissertation is to investigate whether L2 learners can acquire and perform native-like on gender agreement. Gender has been studied by SLA researchers in order to address the central question in generative SLA -- acquirability of syntactic features in the L2. With respect to this question, some studies have shown that L2 learners can exhibit native-like gender agreement, which has been considered as evidence in favor of acquirability of syntactic features, while other studies seem to indicate that gender agreement is permanently impaired in the L2, which has been proposed as evidence against acquirability of syntactic features. In this dissertation, I propose that gender is not an ideal candidate to address this question, because gender is not a purely syntactic feature but rather a complex lexical-morphological and syntactic feature whose acquisition hinges upon a number of factors, and not exclusively on the availability of syntactic features. Following the Separation Hypothesis (Beard, 1995; Lardiere, 2000) and the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997; Prevost & White, 1999), I make a distinction between abstract syntactic features and their concrete lexical-morphological manifestation in a given language, and propose that non-native like performance on the latter may not be indicative of a lack of the former in the interlanguage grammars. Furthermore, I propose that having a first language with gender marking does not necessarily facilitate the acquisition of morphological gender in the L2. In order to test these proposals, I conducted a study with L1 English-L2 Spanish learners, L1 Russian-L2 Spanish learners and native speakers of Spanish using gender comprehension tasks (a grammaticality judgment task and a picture-matching task). The findings show that both high proficiency L1 English and L1 Russian learners of Spanish can behave native-like on gender agreement, and that low proficiency learners are affected by lexical and morphological characteristics of Spanish gender. Thus, syntactic features are in fact acquirable in the L2 irrespective of whether the L1 has gender, but the lexical-morphological component of gender has to be acquired as well in order for the surface gender agreement to appear native-like in a given language. |
