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Is grammatical gender a lexico-syntactic or a lexico-semantic feature for Chinese-German L2 learners?
Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Jin Wang1, Jurriaan Witteman1, Niels,O. Schiller1,2; 1Leiden University, 2City University of Hong Kong
In some Indo-European languages, such as German and Dutch, producing a grammatically correct sentence requires adhering to the principle of grammatical gender agreement. For instance, in the German phrase “das Glas (the glass),” the grammatical gender of the noun "Glas (glass, neuter)" determines the gender of the determiner "das (the, neuter)". Grammatical gender is considered an inherent, intrinsic lexico-syntactic feature of nouns. A number of empirical studies have demonstrated that when producing a noun phrase, the grammatical gender of the noun is always activated and enters the lexical selection stage. In contrast, Chinese does not possess a grammatical gender system. As a typical isolating language, Chinese relies more on semantic connections rather than formal inflections to link words and convey information. Various hypotheses in second language acquisition suggest that the learner’s first language often influences the process of acquiring a second language. Given the significant typological differences between Chinese and German, it is still unclear what mechanisms native Chinese speakers use to process a second language like German. Specifically, when processing grammatical gender features, do native Chinese speakers process them as syntactic or semantic information? This study investigated how native Chinese speakers process grammatical gender features when producing German noun phrases. The experiment employed a picture-word interference paradigm in a picture-naming task. Target pictures were presented simultaneously with superimposed distractor words. Participants were required to name the target pictures overtly in the form of "determiner + noun" in German while ignoring the distractor words. The grammatical gender congruency (whether the target and distractor shared the same gender) and semantic relatedness (whether they belonged to the same semantic category) were manipulated. Naming latencies and the electroencephalogram were recorded simultaneously. Regarding behavioural results, compared to previous studies on native German speakers, the overall naming speed was slow, and no effects of grammatical gender congruency or semantic relatedness were found. Regarding EEG data, time windows and regions of interest for further statistical analysis were identified using mass univariate analysis. The results indicated that, compared to the gender-congruent condition, the gender-incongruent condition elicited more negative voltage amplitudes around 400 ms after stimulus onset. Additionally, compared to the semantically-related condition, the semantically-unrelated condition elicited more negative voltage amplitudes around the 350-600 ms time window. These findings indicated that both the gender congruency and semantic interference effects were detected in second-language learners. Moreover, their manifestation in the EEG data aligns with the typical time windows and brain regions associated with the N400 effect. Therefore, we hypothesized that the grammatical gender processing by native Chinese speakers is related to the processing of semantic information.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Language Development/Acquisition