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English possessive gender agreement in production and comprehension: Similarities and differences between young monolingual English learners and adult Mandarin–English second language learners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2017

LUCIA POZZAN  and
INÉS ANTÓN-MÉNDEZ
LUCIA POZZAN*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
INÉS ANTÓN-MÉNDEZ
Affiliation:
University of New England
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Lucia Pozzan, Department of Psychology and Institute of Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A, Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: lucia.pozzan@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Second language learners of English occasionally establish gender agreement between a possessive determiner and the local noun that follows it, rather than with its target antecedent (*“Maryi loves hisi brother”). The production and comprehension profiles of adult Mandarin second language learners of English and monolingual English-speaking children were examined to establish (a) if such errors result from an inherent tendency to establish agreement locally within the noun phrase or rather from transfer of first language agreement procedures, and (b) if these errors are production specific or rather reflect nontarget grammatical representations, thus also affecting comprehension. The results of the elicited production portion of the study support the hypothesis that gender agreement errors in learners’ production of possessives result from a generalized tendency to establish local agreement. The results of the comprehension portion of the study suggest that the observed tendency for local agreement within the noun phrase is production specific and does not characterize learners’ grammatical representations as a whole.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 985 - 1017
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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