How do native Dutch speakers acquire German grammatical gender? Extending the Incidental L2 Learning Paradigm
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2023-02-01
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en
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Abstract
This study had one general aim: extending the L2 learning paradigm developped by Brandt,
Schriefers and Lemhöfer (2021). This was done in three ways. First, the target population
changed from German (L1) to Dutch (L1) speakers, to see if the paradigm could be employed
in a different population. Second, previous research indicated that inexperienced participants
learned the target grammatical gender structure merely by being exposed to the experiment’s
stimuli (Brandt, Schriefers & Lemhöfer, submitted). Extending this finding, an analysis of
learning over time was performed rather than input-driven learning only. Last, there was an
extra category of words that was formally analysed. In previous research, only the
incompatible nouns – nouns that deviated from the expected grammatical gender – were
analysed (Brandt, Schriefers & Lemhöfer, 2021, submitted), while in the current study the
compatible nouns – nouns that conformed to the expected grammatical gender – were
analysed equally. The methods were otherwise as close as possible to Brandt, Schriefers and
Lemhöfer (2021) for ease of comparison. Most findings were replicated, showing that Dutch
(L1) speakers indeed implicitly learn German articles when input was provided. The timebased
analysis showed that inexperienced Dutch (L1) participants learned by merely being
exposed to the stimuli, and did so nonlinearly. There were some deviating findings from the
previous studies, which implied that there were qualitative differences in experience between
the two sampled populations. This probably related to the more classroom-based experience
of Dutch (L1) speakers compared to the more naturalistic experience of German (L1)
participants.
Keywords: language transfer, dialogue game, grammatical gender, incidental article learning.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen